Strange Fruit Painting

Skip Rohde was an officer in the Navy for over 22 years before becoming a full-time artist. His paintings have won recognition and awards in solo, juried, and curated exhibitions across the eastern half of the United States. In addition, he was the courtroom artist for WLOS-TV in Asheville, NC, and served as the first President of Asheville's River District Artists for three years. Skip served as a civilian reconstruction program manager in Iraq for 18 months and created a number of paintings about the experience. Later, he was a governance advisor with the State Department in Kandahar Province, Afghanistan, for a year. His “Faces of Afghanistan” drawings, a collection of 50 small-scale sketches done mostly from life, have been exhibited in six colleges and universities. Skip currently works out of a studio in the Asheville area and his wife says he can’t go to war zones anymore.