I started painting late in life (if you think 38 is late for finding one’s true vocation).  When I first started it was with the support of a five year payout from State Farm Insurance from the sale of my agency back to that corporation.   I figured I would paint for five years, have a blast, then get a real J.O.B. and return to a normal life.

Well, THAT didn’t happen.  After that five years I basically became unemployable. There was no way I was going to work for someone else. I’m turning 63 in a week or so, and my “life as an artist” has been quite extraordinary. I’m thinking about all this now because of the story of the paintings “Lost in Tangs” and “Lost in Tangs Redux”.

As a newbie artist, (strike “artist”, insert “beginning student”), I was in my second semester of basic painting.   The first semester had been spent on color wheels (agony!), painting rocks and paper bags and eggplant still lifes, as well as valuable lessons such as learning how to keep myself healthy around cadmium red and yellow pigments.

In that second semester  my instructor Kathy Windrow suggested I pick a subject of concentration.   Being born a Floridian exiled in central Texas with a love of salt water I picked “fish” as my subject, and proceeded to paint over 100 of them over the next year.   The painting above was completed in either 1998 or 1999 on a piece of birch board that the nice fellow at Home Depot cut into rectangles for me.  These are powder blue tangs (also called surgeon fish due to their “scalpel” like dorsal fins).

Scroll past a few more years, and I started this painting: “Swimming with the Tangs” based on my memory of swimming with a school of purple tangs on the beach at Isla Mujeres, Mexico.  I’d say I started this painting in 2001 or so, then picked it up again and finally finished it in 2012.

“Swimming with the Tangs” 30X40 Acrylic on Canvas

Next up, hurricane Dorian which chewed up a lot of my paintings, including “Swimming with the tangs”:

So I whacked a piece off and restretched it:

 

I find myself digressing. Back to Lost in Tangs.

Last month I felt compelled to return to my tang schools. I post my paintings as they progress on facebook, and it had come to the time to name the painting.  Facebook friends gave me LOTS of suggestions, but one that kept coming up time and time again was “Lost in Tangs” .  I had already painted that one!  Which made me go back to the website and pull up the image of the original from twenty plus years ago.   Side by side it was pretty eye opening to me what twenty plus years of painting hundreds and hundreds of canvases can DO for an artist.

BUT.  And a big BUT.  I had named the original based on the little lost butterfly fish in the midst of the tangs.   So, in order for it to fully deserve its predecessor’s title, I inserted a little (favorite fish o mine) puffer who is now lost forever in the tang school.

Every painting has a story.  Now you know  the one for “Lost in Tangs”.