I love surprises (sometimes)

'Bath House'

As I mentioned in my last blog, it was aviation art that helped me turn the corner. That was the work that was first noticed for me. When all that happened, I decided that I needed to push that love of aviation art. There are a few big juried shows for aviation art and it was there that I would need to get my work. The massive annual fly in at Oshkosh Wisconsin is one of those shows. I faithfully entered every year and did pretty well. The core of recognized aviation artists are a close knit group and I was the definite outsider. Add to that, I used an airbrush which for a long time in many traditional art circles had been deemed as some sort of cheat.

One goal that I had (as lofty as it seemed) was to have my work printed in Flying magazine. I sent several well constructed pleas but found little success. Over time my passion for painting planes was set aside for my passion for painting cars and we bring the story to the present.

The other day, I happened to find my name linked to an issue of Flying magazine back in 2001. Clicking the link, I found that in May of that year, they did a feature on some of the paintings from that year's show at Oshkosh. Surprisingly, the painting 'Bath House' was on the top of that page.

Sometimes things get checked off the Bucket List without you even knowing!