I have always enjoyed, no, needed to create art. I have done it all my life yet celebrating my 70th year, I feel like I am just beginning.
Like every kid, I wanted to draw and color. Even at a young age, my teachers noted that the arts were a special interest; teacher in report card from kindergarten: “Keith is easily distracted but loves to draw”. I spent Saturday mornings watching Jon Gnagy’s program on drawing. My parents purchased his drawing kit of white, black, and gray chalks. The feeling of having that first drawing kit surpassed the feeling of opening a brand-new box of crayons. This was a serious kit for serious artists, and it represented my parents’ support.
I then started painting in watercolor. My first ‘major’ work at the age of eleven was a watercolor painting copied from my aunt’s Bali Hai Bra box. It was a tropical swimming pond with a topless Polynesian woman swimming below a waterfall. (I am not sure how being topless advertises bras, but there it was.) My father, not one to celebrate the naked human form (the Visible Woman plastic model, a birthday gift from my aunt was promptly hidden on receipt), thought that art had taken a decidedly wrong turn. He ordered me to remove the woman from the painting which today is just a light smear of brown in the blue water of the painting.
That first painting did define, however, my life-long interest in organic forms in nature. I have done few, if any, cityscapes and man-made structures rarely take center stage in my paintings. I like the forms delivered by nature (“consider the lilies of the field…”) in all their variety including the human form. Those forms are endless in color, pleasing lines, and movement. I am interested in movement because movement means life, means joy.
So, why at 70 do I feel like I am also at a beginning? Art was not my vocation; it was always my avocation. My parents, being products of the Great Depression, did not steer me or support me in making art the center of my working life. It was a hobby to them, a passion to me. I do not want to suggest that my parents did not see the value of the arts. My mother made sure that we went to plays. My parents had classical music in our home. We had reproductions of the art masters and had some pieces of original art. My mother was an avid paint-by-number person. So, I did do what I could with the full support of my wife and children. I was a member of the Utah Watercolor Society. I participated in juried shows and displayed in galleries. As the years went on, however, with school, marriage, family, and work, I set my art aside at times. However, I would have to return to it for meaning, joy, and sanity even if in reduced doses. I like to create. Fortunately, my vocation, designing software for use in patient care, also afforded a creative life. Now, however, my time can more fully be given to art and I feel a need to explore it in the time I have.
I cannot claim to be a self-didactic. I have studied watercolor painting with Ed Maryon and George Dibble. I have studied life drawing with Paul Davis and John Erickson. I am inspired by several artists; Édouard Manet for courage, Joaquín Sorolla for immediacy and light, Edgar Degas for draftsmanship of line and composition, Charles Reid and Winslow Homer for watercolor, Alex Kanevsky for dream states, and Billy Schenck and James C. Christensen for humor. There are so many others and I try to learn from them all. The nature of art is to continuously learn. I heard a story when visiting Claude Monet’s home at Giverny. He had a painting from Paul Cézanne, I believe, that he kept leaning against a wall, painted surface towards the wall. When asked why, he said, in effect, that he could only view it in small doses because the beauty of it overwhelmed him.
There is a story that Renoir’s last words at the age of 78 concerning painting were: “I think I’m beginning to learn something about it.” In the end then, art is about an experience or a journey, not a product. Monet said, “Everyone discusses my art and pretends to understand, as if it were necessary to understand, when it is simply necessary to love.” I hope you find something here to love.