A LIFETIME OF CREATIVITY

For as long as I can remember I’ve been crazy about art. As a young boy I posted a sign on my bedroom door that said “Gary’s Workshop” where I created drawings and other artwork. I remember being so proud to have my own “workshop” with a sign on my door.

In one of my earliest memories, I was attending a funeral service where I was occupying my time by coloring with crayons. I remember asking my Mom about what Heaven is like. At that time in my life, my ideas of Heaven was having crayons in all the colors possible. My Mom assured me that In Heaven I could have all the colors I wanted.

To this day I am still fascinated with color and it’s effect on the way people feel. I consider myself to be a “colorist” (although only minimally so), which is defined as someone who is more concerned with the effect of color than being true to the color that is actually there before his or her eyes. As such I will sometimes exaggerate the colors in my paintings in order to create a certain feeling in the viewer. A true colorist will often stray far from the actual colors in their subject matter whereas I prefer to “push” color a little for the effect.

I also remember being in 5^th grade when my class was told that there was one space available for the school’s “art club”. There were five of us that raised our hands to be included, so they asked each of us to pick a number between one and five. I chose the number four (my birth date), and I won the final spot in the club! I felt so grown up to be a member of the art club. My first assignment was to create a comic strip for the new school newsletter.

Just recently (in 2019) I entered two paintings into an art show which happened to be held in the same building where I attended 4th, 5th and 6th grades. I got to see the room where I started my career in art. It was AMAZING to relive a little bit of my creative past! The old school looked just how I remembered it (except for being a little smaller than I thought).

I still have some of the creative projects I worked on as a kid. Way back in the 1970’s my younger brother Rob and I created original glass Christmas ornaments by bleaching the insides of old glass ornaments and repainting them by hand. I still have a couple of those ornaments which get placed on our Christmas tree every December.