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Drawing, Colored Pencil on Paper
Size: 36 W x 71 H x 0.1 D in
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I remember so clearly, staying at my Aunt Nancy’s apartment and her singing Puff the Magic Dragon on her Stella folk guitar to me. I was probably 11 years old then, and looking back on it, I think that each of us kids got shipped off to an Aunt or grandparents’ house for a weekend to give my parents time to “reconnect”. During one of these parental breaks, my Aunt Nancy gave me her Stella guitar. I loved that thing — and her. I used to practice every day. I took my lawn mowing money and hired Terry Clark, a kid from down the block who played, I paid Terry to teach me some chords and how to play. I also remember a time when our cousins came to Algonac (the Garavaglias - my parents said we were cousins by osmosis), anyways, after swimming off our dock in the St. Clair River, Nancy Garavaglia came up to my brother Bill’s and my bedroom and we played around a little on the guitar…I’m pretty sure that’s when I started falling for older women — she was 12 and I was 11 — but the guitar made me feel like I was 13…hahaha. Moments like that made me want to learn how to play. I’d practice every chance I got. The only place to practice was in our bedroom. I don’t think my practice was that annoying, but my brother Bill did. He was lying on his bed and as I practiced, he rolled over, grabbed a hardbound book, probably his history book, and threw it at me catching the guitar on the side of its body and shattering it in two. Yeah, that was my brother. I mowed lawns for another two years before I had enough money to buy my first new, nylon string folk guitar from W.T. Grants. — it just wasn't the same... Here are some progressives of my Aunt Nancy's Stella Guitar (pre-shattered)
2024
Colored Pencil on Paper
One-of-a-kind Artwork
36 W x 71 H x 0.1 D in
Not applicable
No
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My drawings are highly rendered personal items that come from my childhood growing up on the St. Clair River in Algonac, Michigan. I call my work “Happy Art” because the inspiration to create each piece is simple to appreciate, easy to understand, and the work makes me -- and others, happy. Before I started drawing again, I spent 40 years of my life working in advertising, an industry I still love. Twenty of those years were spent as an international, award-winning Executive Creative Director working for some of the largest ad agencies in the country on some of the most creative accounts in the world. Much of that career was spent in vibrant, competitive, creative advertising markets like Los Angeles, Silicon Valley, and Phoenix. Then, in 2010, we moved to Fresno… where for the first time in my professional career I experienced, what it’s like to have my creative soul sucked dry. That was just my experience, and as they say, “your mileage may vary.” It was awful — but here’s the amazing part; my wife, Lynn, knew how unhappy I was, and without any job offer or freelance prospects to provide income, she told me to quit. I think her exact words were, “Get the f**k out of there now! Please.” I did. That’s where this journey truly begins. Lynn encouraged me to start drawing again — something I hadn’t done in many years. My natural instinct was to pour what I was feeling emotionally into my art. My first attempts at painting captured the emotional struggle I was feeling of being trapped in darkness, yet needing to let my creativity out. But, these pieces were dark and somewhat foreboding. The issue for me was that this direction (while true) was not cathartic and was not making me happy. I’d always found drawing with a pencil to be meditative, so one day, I sat down at my desk and started drawing my Stan Smith tennis shoes. They were so beat-up, just like me. The leather was incredibly soft with some scars and scuffs, like me. And yet they still had a lot of life left in them, once again, like me. When Lynn saw what I was doing she wanted it framed and hung by our front door so that everyone coming to our home could see what her husband had drawn. That felt so great. It was like being a kid again and having a drawing put on the refrigerator for everyone to see. Then it hit me, I was feeling really happy. What to draw next? I started thinking about the things that made me happy as a child. As I drew, I put progressive drawings up on social platforms.
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