Before he was the Painter of Light, and before I was the creator of Dinotopia, Tom Kinkade and I were two unknown and penniless art students.
We had grown weary of sitting in windowless classrooms enduring lectures about art theory. We hatched an audacious plan to drop out of school for a while, hop on a freight train, and discover America.Our goal was to document everything in our sketchbooks. Our heroes were Lewis and Clark, John Steinbeck, and Jack Kerouac. My mother was so terrified of the fate that might befall me (her brother was killed by a freight train) that she took out a life insurance policy on me.
On September 16, 1980, a friend dropped us off at the Los Angeles freight yard. We spotted a boxcar with an open door, threw our backpacks into it, climbed aboard, and sat in the shadows waiting for the train to start rolling east.
(Read the rest on Substack)
(Read the rest on Substack)
5 comments:
Just today I stepped foot into a library for the first time in at least 15 years, and I found your book The Artist's Guide To Sketching. Serendipity, synchronicity, or both? Can't wait to dig into it. I've skimmed through it before, when I saw a copy at another library 20 years ago. Even from just casual glancing over, I think it's possibly the greatest book on outdoor sketching.
Interestingly, I find this old blog of yours more attractive to visit than the Substack one. I suspect it's the visual appearance of the page: the background color, the narrowness of the text column...
JR, I know what you're saying. I do like that Blogger gives me the option to add a search box and a topic index in the side column.
Chris, thanks for the compliment. It sounds you've got a good library.
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