Day One

First day of my blog.

I started painting in the Autumn of 2008 and it has been the focus of my life since then.
Oils.
This seems to have come out of nowhere.
I never painted before this.
But there is an antecendent to my new found skill:

Picture it....
Hull Massachusetts, summer by the shore.
It's too rainy to go swimming so I'm on the wide front porch of my grandparents' summer house with nothing to do but watch the chilly fog rolling in from the sea. Aunt Fay shows me how, by making a grid of horizontal and vertical lines across a panel of my comic book, I can, section by section, reproduce the figure of Archie on another larger grid drawn on newsprint. With this grid, I can reproduce any contour !
I file this technique away for later use and take it out again when I am ill in bed for long periods of time in my early teens.
I copied Winslow Homer scenes of men in fishing boats.
Rockwell Kent's illustrations for Moby Dick on shirt cardboards.
They were pretty good, too.
I don't know where they are now..put away when I went off to school and lost.