Updated October, 2022

“Painting is easy when you don’t know how, but very difficult when you do.”  Edgar Degas

Learning to be a better painter during the years of the pandemic led me to explore painting with oils.

While I once used special oil paints to hand-tint my black & white photographs (like my grandmother), I no longer have the darkroom to experiment with the infrared and black&white development.

As a youngster, I remember having a paint-by-number oil kit.  My parents repeatedly told me it would take a long time for my treasure to dry. I think my father placed it in the basement on top of the ceiling furnace duct work.  In fact it may be still there, concealed behind new walls. And do you know you can’t find oil paint-by-number-kits anymore? They’re all acrylic paints in the kit.

I do still enjoy watercolors and loved urban sketching during my travels of pre-pandemic years,  I’ve come to enjoy painting still lifes and plein air with oil paints.

In January 2022, I completed a challenge to paint daily for a month and found it an illuminating challenge.  For starters, every grocery run brought new possibilities for painting a still life!

While it was a great joy to build and sell musical instruments and make music for more than 12 years, I’m taking a reprieve and focusing on growing my oil painting skills.

I hope you will join me as the road curves and leads to destinations yet unimagined.

You can find prints and my paintings at ArtPal and locally at Satchel’s Oct. 12 – Nov ?, 2022.