Robert Smith
Robert Smith was an American artist who died in 1985. When I knew him, he already was an elderly man. He lived with his teenage son in Kettering, Ohio in…
Study: Making the Painting ‘The Call’
I thought it would be interesting to follow a painting from start to finish. The subject is a woman making a call on her cell phone, hence the title–The Call.…
Castles in the air
I knew a writer who wanted to transition from the technical documents that he wrote to pay his bills to fiction. His vision inspired a whole universe; not one novel…
Family mystery
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…
The lady who gave up
Fresh off the boat that summer; I was a wide-eyed kid in New York for the first time. I gorged myself on galleries and museums. I was as fresh and raw as…
So, war it is
When I was a kid, we lived near a SAC base (Strategic Air Command) where the nuclear bombers were stationed. Depending on the prevailing winds, the noise from the B-52’s…
Rebuilding my computer
My beat-up homemade computer is 15 years old. Future-proofing my computer by building it myself worked but not as well as I’d hoped. The new motherboard with current technologies, for…
Museum Etiquette
For me, standing in front of a painting is like listening to a concert or attending a play. I try to meet the artist on his terms and I open…