Sounded Like Love to Me: Why I create art

My mom and step-dad visiting me at Rich Haines Gallery in Park City

I know right out of the box that this will probably only be read by 8 - 10 of you out there. That's fine. What matters is that this blog entry is relevant to my motives, and that kind of insight helps me remember why I put in the hours to try and do this well.

If you know Chico, the city I grew up in (located in the near center of the top square of California), you know that it can have serious rain that comes in off the coast. I mean ... serious rain. Big rain. It can stay for days on end sometimes.

I love rain.

There's a feeling like everyone is somehow

Thank you to my first studio - 100 year old Harrington School

Here's my first studio … a classroom in the old Harrington School in downtown American Fork. It was
just me, all alone, in a 100-year-old schoolhouse of probably 100k square feet of ghostly excellence.

This blog entry is my tip-of-the-cap to the best place I can think of to start my painting career. I painted there for about 6 months, starting in

Teaching our daughters to curtsy: Thoughts on the power of a gesture in art

"Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose" by John Singer Sargent

You might be as lucky as my wife and I have been to rear children in a day and age where the easy choice is to be cynical about culture and life in general. If you chose that path, who could blame you? There's evidence for a dumbed-down society all around you (especially if you look for it). I say "lucky" because the beautiful things in this world still shine brightly like flecks of gold in a gold pan amid the black sand. The thing is, you need to know where to go to find the beautiful things sometimes, just like when you are panning for gold.

Kelly and I were blessed with two sons and two daughters and I refer to myself as the luckiest guy in the world. Each personality different than the next, our kids developed their own likes and dislikes, chose their own friends, and learned to see the world through their own eyes. It is fascinating to watch their development into fully-functioning adults who end up asking if they can borrow the car.

As parents, she and I found that they are all hungry for information to handle life's social settings ... basically, they didn't want to mess up in public. We tried to teach them the good stuff that we were taught for such occasions, such as saying 'please' and 'thank you' (our parents' generation was taught to "mind your 'Ps' and 'Qs'").