Among what I was genuinely excited about getting in the division of my father’s belongings was the art I’d given dad which I was assured  would all fall back to me.

It went back to my early teens when I carved a buffalo out of talc and made a crochete hook from a bone that I found in the forest. Fresh back from the Air Force, I painted three pictures before heading off to college. They were the best I’d ever done and each was given to someone I loved. One of those, an oil of little trees, was dad’s.

I’d gone to Glacier National park in my GT6. I remember showing up near night fall and trying to sleep by the road inside the park. A ranger clarified that sleeping by the road is a no-no. So I slept in the car just outside the park in a place called Saint Mary’s if I recall correctly.

Fog and bumper to bumper traffic met me the next morning in the park. Being a nice guy, I gave the hitch hiker a ride but it was the last time I ever did except for the infamous gas can incident in the Fiat. No sooner did he set his butt down in the little two seater than   British Machine smell was overpowered by his dark fumes of bodily neglect. His habit was to bathe each time he crossed a state line as he’d done two weeks prior when he entered Montana. It took miles and miles to waft the rest of his thick odor out of the cabin.

At a major sight seeing place there were dudes in colored sheets asking for money and saying the word “hairy”  over and over. They looked suspicious.

Before the sun melted away the low clouds and fog, I climbed an embankment to a field with wild  flowers and tiny evergreens in a tapestry of green with dirty snow. When I got home with my Honorable Discharge, I painted that scene.

The same summer, I painted Mount Saint Helens and the coast at Pacific City. My grandparents got the coast painting. Dad got the little trees. Mt. Saint Helens went to a friend.

Dad had a nice inventory of historical pieces of art that I’d made for him. I drew a sketch of a mountain lake, A portrait of him in colored pencil, a live sketch in graphite, a little forest landscape, and he had a sketch from an art composition class featuring paper bags. He also had a bone crochete hook, some arrowheads, a talc bison, and a bronze casting of a leopard.

The colored pencil sketch was one of those experiements where I layed down deep layers of the color, grinding them into each other. My sweet-as-an-unripe-blackberry wife told me I should hide that picture before dad saw it. When he came to visit, I showed him the studio that I’d built and told him he could have any picture in it. That’s the one he picked.

I teasingly tried to get the picture of the paper bags from dad for decades and was always rebuffed. It was his. He was keeping it. He hung it in the living room. I think he liked that none of his friends had paper bag art.

The mountain lake sketch was almost perfect. If I had it to day, I’d make a few changes that would make it unabashedly spectacular.

As it turned out, of all the art that I gave him, I wanted three pieces more than the others. The oil painting of Glacier National Park, the leapard bronze from art school and welding days (I made the base when I was in college getting a certificate of proficiency in welding and brazing), and the paper bag sketch.

In the end, I got a couple of the arrowheads, the Jaguar, the little crochete hook, and the Bags drawing. So out of the ones I wanted the most, I got two! From the collection, I probably got my share even if it isn’t what was promised. Because I can paint and have paintings, I let the rest go to other siblings who can not.

Dad sat for this 10 to 14 years before he died.

I’m not sure of this is the painting or the photo. Oils on the skin of door panel if it’s the painting. After my grandparents died, whoever did the estate most likely got it.

This is a photo I took of the Glacier Park painting four years ago. It was too foggy to see any of the grand views but this became my favorite memory of the place.

The instructor would toss the bags out in a pile and have us sketch them with black and white conte. Dad had a fondness for this 1976 sketch.

A bronze casting made with the lost wax process in the middle 1970’s that I brazed onto a brass base and added a palm tree shortly after.