My father loved art and the walls of our house were filled with paintings, many of which were by their friend Jack Cooley who was a painter in New Orleans. Jack had a little studio on Bourbon Street across from Pat O'Brians (a famous bar) in the French Quarter and the summer I was 14 I was sent to spend two weeks with Jack and Joanie and their three kids for him to give me painting lessons. Jack was not inclined to be an instructor of any kind so basically turned me loose to explore the French Quarter while he painted and drank. He was not very successful and so a couple of times my parents invited him to do a showing at our house, inviting friends and colleagues to view and hopefully buy some of Jack's paintings. We always ended up with several. He even painted a mural in our house in the family room. Anyway I've written more extensively about Jack before and you can read it here.
When us kids were young our parents would take us to the Museum of Fine Art and other venues. I was pretty young and those memories are pretty vague now. As a teenager I would go with my father to art openings sometimes at a few galleries, particularly Meredith Long Gallery, because Mother would no longer go with him. I guess she found them boring but my father liked to hob nob.
My parents groomed me to be an artist. I was always taking art lessons of one kind or another, either in school or after school, but to my father being an artist meant being a painter, working with oils or acrylics. He even finagled a promised show at a gallery from one owner (which I'm sure the guy was just humoring my father) and somehow got me a gig ghost painting for another successful artist (copying his paintings doing the basic color blocks and then he would do the finishing work and sell them, sort of like making prints only they were paintings). I only did about three before he cut me loose because the problem was, painting didn't grab me, I wasn't good at it, and after a few years I gave it up altogether. I did like to draw though and it was the drawing that was the backbone of the carved and etched glass I ended up making a fairly successful career out of with Marc's help and participation even though we lived hand to mouth a lot of the time.
My father had a pretty bad stroke in the early '80s, no paralysis but he suffered from speech aphasia. At that time, he wrote letters to each of us three kids but we didn't get them until after he died from another major stroke in '96. What I remember most about my letter (I no longer have it as it was in a box that got submerged during the flood) was that he considered my fledgling etched glass studio as a temporary side distraction until I got back to the serious business of being an artist and painting. I have no idea if he finally accepted what I was doing as art, being an artist, but I'm pretty sure he was still disappointed that I never became a painter.
And now, here I am many decades later, finally exploring, learning to paint only with watercolors and not oils. Key word here...learning.
Today we finished our snowscapes though I may still work on mine here at home as I'm really dissatisfied with the big trees. Joy's parting words were 'don't overwork it. Gay, that ship has sailed.
The instructors finished demo painting.
And mine.
