Dad the artist

My Dad was an artist. He had a degree from the Maryland Institute of Art. He painted many paintings (landscapes and portraits) and worked as a graphic artist. I'm still cleaning out his artist materials, and I keep finding bits and pieces of everything.

I'm finding all this graphic arts work (mainly brochures for a local travel company) and looking at all of the pieces required for one item, I'm in awe. it must have taken so long do things that now, with computers, I have done in a matter of an hour. It gives me a newfound respect for what people like him did before everything became so digitized.

I've talked about dad as a painter and a graphic artist, but when I think of him in the artistic part it is always going to be him as the person who did antique art restoration of local church statues. He would take these church statues that had been extremely damaged and restore them to their former glory. I look at the pictures of what had been and then I see the pictures of what he did to them and I am in awe.

When I was cleaning out part of the family room, that Dad had used as a studio, I found a mold of a foot. 

 We knew it was his foot, used to fix a statue, and I'm still amazed. I like to think that I view the world as an artist (I'm an amateur photographer), but I'm not sure I would even know where to begin looking at something like this before picture.

I have been scanning and posting photos of Dad's work: Facebook album of Dad's work

As I'm looking at these photos I can't help but remember all the times i helped Dad set up St. Hedwig's nativity (inside and out- I vividly remember him sending me outside to "borrow" some straw from the manger so we could get the inside scene to sit right) and Easter scenes. When cleaning out I even found one of the lambs (there were two, but one of them was smashed to smithereens- it think he was supposed to fix it- but it I think it was beyond repair)

(given to him after the Church was closed) that I don't think I will ever be able to get rid of.



We even made the paper (another find as I was cleaning)