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What a surprise it was to receive an email inquiring about a "vintage" painting for sale on eBay.  It was a gouache portrait of a pair of Cedar Waxwings from the year I graduated from high school and started college!

Certainly no prodigy, I got bitten by the painting bug shortly after being bitten by the birdwatching bug.  My Dad was a commercial artist back in the day when pen and ink drawings of everything were done for advertising purposes.   Black and white photos were retouched by hand with an airbrush or a set of gray gouache paints and paintbrush.  Absolutely NO CGI was available!  By watching him work, I got the gist of how the painting process went.  So after my birding initiation, I asked to borrow some of his paints and a brush.

My initial tunnel-vision fascination with birding and painting remained strong throughout high school, sparing me some of the social upheaval of the late 60s and its accompanying drugs, alcohol and the like.  As a senior, the father of the first girl I ever dated recognized my abilities and paid me a whopping $10 for some of my bird paintings, affording me cash to take his daughter out for a movie and pizza.  Only years later did I realize that he basically paid me to entertain and feed his kid while he was gaining some valuable coverage for blemishes on his walls.  Hey, at least I was selling some pieces, Vincent.  

I headed off to Kent State University in the Fall of '67 with dreams of becoming a wildlife (or bird, actually) artist.  Was I off base.  A hotbed of political dissent and anarchical thought, the philosophy had definitely infiltrated the College of Art.  As a freshman art major, assigned projects I created were usually greeted with scorn.  "That's not art!  There's no passion in it!!" was what I heard.  Once my assignment was tossed into a corner by the professor saying I wasn't "getting it.  That's just illustration."  Wasn't that what I wanted to do?  My Spring Quarter major art course was presented with the class assignment for the whole quarter on day one:  Build a self-destructing project.  My Dad about had a cow when he heard about it!  Some excellent art professors from the old Cleveland Art Institute had come to Kent decades earlier.  But the winds of change driven by a Modernist vanguard were pushing them out.  Portraying the Beautiful was the old.  Ugliness and Rebellion were the new.  (I was indeed fortunate to be taught by two real masters of their craft for a couple of courses.  Beyond that, and for my purposes, my eventual flight from art to a zoology major was more than justified.) 

That next summer, old-school Dad did a cartoon (his real love in art) for the Ohio Department of Natural Resources.  Dropping it off and small-talking with someone there, the conversation got around to did he know anyone who drew animals and wildlife, as they needed some illustrations done on a freelance basis.  At Dad's urging, I "happened in" with a small portfolio of my birds.  I was hired on the spot as a summer intern.  I interned with ODNR each summer until I finished at Kent State then was promoted to full-time nature artist and stayed for over 30 years.  Which brings me to the point of the story.

Just like the famous Impressionists, Expressionists, Tonalists and all the others -ists, the value of my work has skyrocketed.  Even though, like Mark Twain, the rumors of my death are greatly exaggerated, this gem from 1967 has quintupled its original price within my own lifetime.  As I stated above, move over Van Gogh, Monet, Warhol, Pollock---there's a new kid on the block!