For those who have that leaning there is the following:
Born February, 1932, as in, "damn that's old".
Graduated from Jones Valley High School, near Birmingham, Alabama ,at the bottom of my class in 1950. Some would even argue that I didn't graduate, but let's not quibble.
Korean war vet that was fortunate enough not to see Korea.
Married Billie Jean Burns in 1952. If you like to count the months it was fifteen months later we had our first child.
Then, bam, bang, we had two more.
I Attended the University of Alabama on the GI bill and graduated in 1957 with a BS degree in Mechanical Engineering. I wasn't at the bottom of my class this time and I even made Tau Beta Pi and Pi Tau Sigma engineering honor societies.
For the next fifty plus years I engaged in various engineering and business activities that occupied too much of my time.
As a child I was interested in art but without any training nothing much came of it. My formal training in art is even now minimal. But my engineering training got me started. Engineers draw to convey their ideas. In my day most engineers worked in two dimension drawings. I preferred three dimensions. A mechanical drafting class taught me to draw a coke bottle in three dimensions. I thought that was cool.
When I started working as an engineer I would always draw a picture rather than make two dimensions drawings, .....if I could get away with it.
Billie and I bought our first house sometime around 1960 and in decorating it Billie wanted a picture to go over the couch. But not just any picture. She wanted one with a lot of green in it. Being a "can do" guy, I told her I would paint her a picture. Our daughter, Luci, still has the picture. It is the one named Naugahyde in the gallery. The couch was green naugahyde and Billie wanted a match.
The Naugahyde picture got me started and I painted more over the next five to six years. I did most of them in oil. We didn't have acrylic back then.
I tracked down a few of the old paintings to photograph for this web gallery. I did a lot of portraits in pastels at that time but none survived.
I stopped painting in 1967. Earning a living was just too much of a full time activity.
During the ensuing years I did continue to draw at work. This was the time we were building J Bar Manufacturing. Most of the drawings were done in soapstone and chalk on the floor of our plant in Trion, Georgia. Sometimes the floor wasn't swept for weeks while we finished making whatever it was I had drawn on the floor.
In 1995 ,while Billie and I were living in Mexico, I got to know a local artist named Saul Rodriguez Covarrubias and his association reignited my interest. We acquired a lot of his water color paintings.
I learned a little more about oils and pigments in Mexico. Some painters there use only hand ground pigments from the surrounding country side.
Gradually I started painting again. I don't remember what inspired me. I discovered acrylics this time and I used them for a while but I missed the versatility and feel of painting with oils. Eventually I went back to oils and I use them exclusively now.
My web page gallery has pictures of the older paintings when I could find them along with the newer ones. You can observe the change in style that happened over fifty years.
Billie and I have lived in Trion, Georgia for over forty years and we still call that home. We have a house and studio in Trion and lately spend a lot of time there. We also have an apartment in Midtown, Atlanta we also call home. You might find us in either place.
My paints and painting panels have varied greatly over the years. The first paintings were done on sign cloth. At the time I worked at Fulton Mills in Atlanta as their plant engineer and we manufactured sign cloth. Over the years I have painted on card board, concrete, glass, wood panels, fiberglass insulation and of course canvas.
I have always made my own panels for painting. These days I use wood panels if the painting is less than five square feet and canvas panels if the painting is larger. It has to do with weight. I like wood but it gets heavy in the large sizes.
Paints
My paintings done back in the sixties were done using oils from the art stores that came in tubes.
In the nineties when I was in Mexico I discovered cheap. The Mexicans wrote the book on how to create art on zero budget. A variety of stones, clays, bricks and oxides were hand ground to create the colorful paint pigments. The standard oil was a cheap house grade linseed oil. I am sure that other vegetable oils were used.
I didn't use acrylics until 2007. I had already encountered acrylic paints used in construction and remodeling activities and I knew their virtues. As far as the painting is concerned there seem to be equal pros and cons in comparing oils with acrylics. It's hard to tell the difference in the finished product.
Acrylics win when it comes to cleaning up. It is a pure joy to be able to use water rather than thinner or turpentine to clean brushes and pallets.
But in the end I went back to the same basics that the old masters used and that is a vegetable oil mixed with raw pigment. There are several vegetable oils that work satisfactorily for me but linseed oil mixed with a little wax is my preference.
I use some tube paints along with the pigments.
The Canvas
To me canvas is a cloth. But to an artist it seems to be what they paint on. It can be plywood, plow blades, windows, stretched canvas or anything that will take paint. I prefer the term, paint panel.
I make my own paint panels and today they are limited to canvas and wood panels.
Over the years however I have painted on many different materials.
I am influenced mostly by the Dutch and Flemish masters of the sixteenth century such as Pieter Brugel, and Adrian Ostade and of course by the Mexican artists I met while living in Mexico.
Whatever I am, I like to think of myself as an entertainer. I start out entertaining myself as I plan a picture. If it turns out good then I'm entertained.
Then I hope someone else is entertained.