Portraits of Parents

These are portraits of my parents. One thing I like about doing a museum show is there’s just no need for commercial consideration. Pieces are very personal pieces to me that I plan to keep. My parents are recently deceased, both of them. And one of my father I painted while he was still alive, actually.

Both of these I painted from photographs. The portrait of our mom I painted very shortly after her death. I think it just shows her the way I want to see her. This shows her about 13 years or so before her death. And you know, I just kind of liked her smile and of all the paintings I’ve done of her, this was my favorite one.

I know my sister was kind of bugged by the fact that my dad’s looking askance. He looked askance sometimes and he had his doubts about me, that’s for sure. That’s okay. Without him I wouldn’t have become an artist, that’s for sure. He taught me how to draw when I was an inconsolable little kid. We drew a cross section of an airplane, and I was completely transfixed ever since.

He picked up a pencil, he drew this biplane, and it was on a blank piece of paper. There was nothing, and then quickly there was an image. And it still blows my mind and that’s why I paint. This painting on the left is a portrait of my father on his deathbed. It’s a little bit inaccurate. I changed that for drama’s sake because this was painted about three or four years before he died.

It sure looked like it to me. And we were talking about the next world a lot. And I set up my portable painting kit in the nursing home, where he was at that time. He called it prison. I don’t blame him for that, he hated it and I hated it too, I hated it for him. And I spent a lot of time there and he told me a lot of things about our early life that I didn’t know during that time.

I was amazed, but he did actually extricate himself from that prison and lived at home for the next three or four years. And it was a miraculous turnaround, as far as I was concerned. And then he did die, at advanced age, 94. And that’s when it’s time to die. And, uh, he was done. He was done with his work on Earth.

And I, and all of my siblings, there’s, I’m one of six. And we all participated equally, and wholeheartedly in assisting our parents really during the last 10 years, especially the last two or three years. And I was proud to be a member of a team like that.