... and at the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time. –T.S. Elliot

You are called, “the old man in the back,” by the young workers at an Anchorage art framing shop. You are doing what you frequently fall back on to earn a living, matting and framing art. You would rather be working on your latest watercolor painting, but you have bills to pay. 

While busy preparing to cut a mat to frame a twenty dollar poster, a young female coworker walks by and warns, “Kevin, be careful with that poster; it’s expensive.”

Bent over your work table, you look up at her and with a patient half smile reassure her, yes, you’ll be careful. Turning your attention back to the mat, you pause smiling to yourself. You can’t help but think back to when you owned your own art gallery in New York City. There you were matting and framing museum pieces for the Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Guggenheim, and the Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art. The young coworker’s admonishment is just another reminder that life is humbling, especially for an artist.

With your attention now distracted, you decide to take a break and get a cup of coffee. At the coffeemaker you pour a cup, add some cream, sit down at a nearby chair, and take your first sip. The comforting taste of the coffee sends your mind back to the beginning.

In sixth grade you won a poster drawing contest, and that recognition verified and spurred your interest in art. You started taking art classes in and outside the school curriculum throughout junior high and high school. You developed a close friendship with a schoolmate who was also interested in art, and you both encouraged each other’s shared interest.  

Your three brothers and mother lived in a townhouse that your father rented in Waukegan, Illinois. Your mother and father were separated. The townhouse had a basement, and you cleared out an area under the stairwell to set up your first art studio. That first art studio gave you a sanctuary to focus on your growing passion through those trying teenage years.

Life during your youth wasn’t all about art. You fell in love your senior year of high school with a young woman in her junior year. Soon after graduation you and she were married and had your first son. With a young family to support art took a back seat, and you worked on the assembly line at the Johnson Outboards factory on the shore of Lake Michigan. You and a platoon of others on the assembly line did what robots now perform.  You were a human machine, furiously repeating the same motions thousands of times each day. Then one day the grinding noise of the assembly line suddenly stopped, and all was strangely silent.  Several stations down the line one of the older workers lay crumpled and motionless on the cement factory floor. It was the early 1970s, before one dialed 911 for emergency help, before CPR was taught and promoted, and before portable defibrillators.

Everyone remained at their stations and stared at the fallen worker. Soon a supervisor ran down the line followed by two first aid attendants carrying a stretcher. They lifted the still unconscious man into the stretcher and quickly hustled him off to the first aid station.  Before anyone could reflect on what had just happened, the assembly line ground back in motion and you resumed your robotic motion assembling outboards.

You learned later that the fallen worker died of a heart attack. Through his death you realized that you couldn’t continue life on the assembly line to eventually be carted off like a piece of factory scrap. You decided you needed to follow your passion - art.

You and your wife saved some money and in 1976 moved to Saint Paul, Minnesota, where you enrolled in the School of Associated Arts. This was your first serious study of fine art and you thrived in this new world. You found yourself drawn to painting watercolors and spent much time painting still lifes and painting landscapes outdoors, “en plein air,” along the Mississippi River. 

After a few years you were drawn to the great art mecca, New York City (NYC). Until you got settled, your wife and son remained in Saint Paul. You loaded up your 1972 Pinto, towing a small U-Haul, and began your next journey. The drive to NYC wasn’t easy going.  You developed a serious tonsil condition, Quincy Throat. At two o’clock in the morning you stopped at an emergency room in Pennsylvania and were given some antibiotics and pain killer, and sent on your way. You continued much of the rest of your drive in near delirium. How you made it through New Jersey, in thunderstorms and city traffic, God only knows. Instead of arriving in NYC, you showed up on the doorsteps of your aunt and uncle in Manhasset, Long Island. Like saints, they nursed you back to health. They also gave you a place to stay that was a short train ride to NYC.  

‍
Thinking back on it, you weren’t as ready for the big city and bright lights as you thought.  You were quite the sight walking down Madison Avenue, carrying your art portfolio and wearing a blue and white seersucker suit, an easy mark for all the panhandlers.

Despite your unsophisticated first appearance in NYC, you started working in a large framing studio in SoHo. Your wife and young son soon joined you, and within a few years you started your own framing business. You became well known as one of the city’s best in matting and framing fine art. Your success eventually allowed you to open art galleries in Manhattan, Brooklyn, and upstate in Sugar Loaf, N.Y.

Although necessary to help support your wife and now two sons, your success with your art galleries didn’t dissuade you from your passion for painting. You took figure watercolor classes at The Art Students League in New York. At the time you didn’t realize the school’s important history and list of past students including the renowned Norman Rockwell.

After 17 years in NYC, you began to yearn for less hustle and bustle and decided to move to northern Wisconsin to be closer to family. Maybe it wasn’t the best decision, because unfortunately, you and your wife were soon divorced.   After the divorce, and seeing that you needed to regroup your life, your two brothers in Anchorage encouraged you to move up to Alaska. Along with your youngest son, you made the big move in 1994.

To support you and your son, you worked in framing and sales for art galleries in Anchorage and Palmer. This work brought you in contact with the works of the many great Alaskan artists which, along with Alaska’s natural beauty, inspired you to refocus on painting. You returned to the world of watercolor.     

You started painting landscapes, and made trips to draw and photograph many of the beautiful areas in Alaska. Too many to list, but a few of your favorites were Turnagain Arm, Petersville Road, the Chugach Range, the Wrangell Mountains, and the Matanuska Valley.  You attended several semesters of studio figure drawing at the University of Alaska, which was invaluable for developing your drawing skills and a great exercise in working quickly to capture the essence of a pose in just a few minutes.

‍
What drew you to watercolors was using only the reflected white of the paper through  translucent layers of pigments. The disadvantage here is that one can never go back and cover over any mistakes as can be done with the opaque mediums (acrylics, gouache, and oils). There is a certain surface quality from the better handmade watercolor paper and a unique quality of light obtained from watercolors that one doesn’t get with the opaque mediums.

What intrigues you most is the unpredictability of watercolors. There are times when exciting things happen as if by accident which adds life to a painting. The paradox is between control and playing it too safe. A good example of this is how some of the best skies are sometimes done using a wet on wet technique by floating washes of color over the paper and only having a minute or two to complete. There is a grace to what happens by itself that can’t be planned or contrived. It’s sometimes better to swing a big brush than to tinker around with little brushes and too much detail.

There is a grace to what happens by itself that can’t be planned or contrived.

You usually start a watercolor with only half a plan using what you can from memory, drawings, photographs, and imagination to come up with an idea. If you plan things out too much and map everything out beforehand, the painting can become lifeless. It’s being more spontaneous and risking mistakes that adds life to a painting, and creates the happy accidents that couldn’t have otherwise been invented. There are times when you have things planned out fairly well, but the painting takes its own course anyway, and then the challenge is to go in a new, unexpected direction.

What you enjoy most, and what can at the same time be the most difficult part of painting, is the creative process. Along with the sense of possibility, there is also the challenge of overcoming the anxiety that can inhibit experimenting and taking on difficult, new ideas and subjects.

Caught in your revery by that young coworker again, she says, “Kevin, we need that poster framed before lunch.” Although you are not quite finished with your coffee, you empty it in the nearby sink, and return to your work table. You think to yourself, a little more than half a day left and you will be free to get back to your latest watercolor.  

It has been fifty years since you won that poster contest in sixth grade. Both your sons are grown now, and you are staying with your oldest son, his wife, and your three young granddaughters. Your granddaughters love teasing you, and you laugh with them on their grandpa pranks. You stay in your son’s basement bedroom that is open to the backyard, and you have your small art studio under the basement stairwell.