"Croft on the Hill" Print

ART JUST FOR THE SAKE OF ART I was born and grew up in the mountains of West Virginia. When I was seventeen, I left home and apprenticed at Kling Studios in Chicago, it was the largest commercial art studio in the country at that time. I attended the Art Institute of Chicago Art School. Through observation I learned much more upstairs where the famous paintings were that I ever learned in the school downstairs. I spent a hitch in the US Navy on board a ship that afforded me a trip to the Mediterranean and access to art all over the southern part of Europe. With that as a beginning, my wife and I had an advertising agency in Virginia Beach, Virginia for many years. Later we published a series of historical fiction novels about our famous ancestor, Robert the Bruce, who was King of Scots in the early 1300’s. In 2015, we pulled up stakes and left for the mountains of Virginia from where both of us grew up. Almost immediately, I began to paint trees on hillsides and mountains and farms. I painted them in oil on canvas. They were loose and happy with bright colors. It was magic time. Within a year I realized that I was mimicking the Fauvist movement of the 1900 era. Artists like Van Gogh, Matisse, Derain, and Braque. One hundred and twenty years past the golden years of Fauvism in Europe, I had to admit, I was, at least somewhat, a Fauvist. Yet, I have discovered a great many diversions from the original philosophy of 1900. As a painter, I am working alone even after finding others in the world that had come to their own conclusions about this obscure school of thinking. Much has been evolved over the last several years, and so, this is where I belong, back in the mountains where much of my work is surrounded by art in general and, painting in particular.