Cedar Point, a Disneyland-like park on Ohio’s Lake Erie, is only a half-hour trip from my house. I picked the perfect day for my visit last week The weather was fine and because it was a school day, the crowds were smaller than normal. Finding parking was easy and the line to get in was…
I use my Nikon Z7 camera all the time. Nearly all my paintings include elements from my own photographs, typically mashups of several photographs. Summer is a great time to take photographs, of course. I stay alert for festivals, fairs, or other events that promise to provide a harvest of usable photos. Next week, I…
The backyard trees are in bloom. Soon, their bones will be hidden beneath their green plumage. Although it can still snow in NE Ohio in early April, this photo from my kitchen against the background of a peaceful Lake Erie brings a smile,
When I go to bed, I often try to think about a problem with a painting. Then my consciousness runs another stream in the background. Before I fall asleep, the solution to the problem occurs to me–‘ah ha!’ Sometimes the solution comes in the morning, and sometimes it doesn’t come. However, as interesting as this…
I’m screwed. My backlog is out of hand; I can’t possibly keep up. The ideas keep coming. It’s not by my will. It seems like ‘something’ outside of me is making paintings and I’m merely the assistant. It surprises and worries me that the ‘something’ doesn’t care that many paintings do not get finished. I…
My great-grandfather Ramey had a fierce personality. Even in his 90’s, he had no time for nonsense, epically from unruly children such as me. My grandmother ascribed her father’s fierceness to his harsh childhood. Orphaned early, his adopted family treated him as little more than a servant. One day, my grandmother’s oft-repeated story went, her…
I’ve seen blood moons before, the red moon that appears during Fall evenings, but I’ve never seen a red moon in the morning until today. When I first saw the moon, it was so bright and fat, I thought it was the sun above Lake Erie. But it is the red-colored moon. I ran to…
Christmas was wonderful again this year. One of my gifts was a new palette. My homemade one is decrepit, as you can see in this photo. I prepared the new palette–a glass-covered reproduction–by removing the reproduction and painting the backing neutral gray. The old palette, including the frame, is the same size as the glass…