Groucho Marx speaking with a straight and sober face stated: “This is what I know; Well, art is art, isn’t it? Still, on the other hand, water is water! And east is east and west is west and if you take cranberries and stew them like applesauce they taste much more like prunes than rhubarb does. Now you tell me what you know” This thought of mine may not make much more sense than he did, but I am going to write it anyway. I would in no way lay claim to being an artist. Even though I do art work for my own pleasure and interest. I have always enjoyed a well done piece of art whether it be a painting, a sculpture, or just a drawing. Of course, they have to be to my liking, there are qualifications to everything, regardless of what we are talking about. Much of modern art and careless graffiti are not to my liking. But when I have been in a museum and look at a picture done by one of the famous ones, and I see a delicate hand with every detail, I think, ‘Now there was a real artist.’
When I speak of art as a journey, I think I speak for most people who, like myself, are somewhat artistic or at least have an interest in art. My journey started in the basement of the Lutheran Church where I was taught my first Sunday School lesson. We were given little coloring books with stories in them about Moses, Noah, Isaias and others. After we were told a story about these great prophets we were allowed to color their pictures. When my Mother passed away many years ago, she had a box of pictures and other momento’s. Included in that box was one of my little coloring books from Sunday School. It brought back pleasant memories of my childhood, almost eighty years earlier. My artistry had evolved very little at that time as I wasn’t even able to stay within the lines. All through grade school I was a doodler, drawing pictures of army jeeps, airplanes dog fighting in the sky: there was always one falling to the earth with smoke billowing behind. It was during the Second World War (1941 to 1945) with terrible destruction and thousands of soldiers dying on both sides.
Later, after a tour of duty in the army, I married and started at a university. I never enrolled in art courses because I did not want to try to compete for a grade with other young people who were artistic. Besides, time was always a factor for me. I was a student who also had to work to provide for my family. One weekend, I remember having a little time and I had an inkling to do something artistic. So I built a little wooden framework that I could place pieces of broken, colored glass in and form a picture. I hadn’t seen it done before and where the idea came from is beyond me. I found some old colored plates that had been chipped or broken and with a pair of pliers, I started breaking pieces to fit with other pieces to form an apple tree. It was kinda cute and interesting and it so happened that after years of being stored away, my daughter found it. One day I was at her home, and low and behold, there was this broken glass picture hanging on her wall. She liked it. It made me feel so good to know that one of my children liked something I had done of an artistic nature.
After graduation from the university, and moving about three times, we felt like we were where we were going to be for a while. Our house was without decorations and money was tight. I decided that I would buy a few canvases, paint supplies and try my hand at painting. It was rather exciting, the idea of doing something artistic even though I had no idea that I could produce any paintings that my wife would allow me to hang on our walls. One out of five had some possibility, the others were so amateurish that even I was embarrassed to think that someone might see them. After a while I painted a few portraits and caricatures that were good enough that a few of my six children wanted to have them and actually hung them on their walls. One of my son’s was getting married and he ask me if he could have two of my pictures for wedding presents. They were separate paintings of an Indian and an old cowboy. I was puffed up for a while after that and quit painting for several years while I finished my doctorate. Then, I had an old pickup I wanted to repaint and by then a few of our kids were driving and needed dent’s taken out of their crashed, learning cars. So I enrolled in an evening auto body class and for several years I spent a couple of nights a week repairing cars. I even ended up doing a few artistic things with a couple of old Volkswagens, by cutting four feet out of the middle of them and welding them back together. I had even been given an opportunity to completely rebuild a wrecked car, my beautiful Chrysler Imperial that my youngest son borrowed and another ran into him. It was considered to be totaled, (not worth repairing). After I got a few years of autobody out of my system I eventually went back to painting a few pictures. But then some thirty years went by, until now, in my mid-eighties, I have plenty of time to paint and write. I even get some encouragement from my family and every once in a while, I paint something that one of the kids are interested in. The journey has been fun, stimulating and enjoyable. That, my friends, is the journey of a very amateur artist, and I apologize not. But what does it matter, I enjoy it and it has even, at times, kept me out of mischief.