I went to a friend’s exhibition last weekend and bought a painting for a wedding present for my nephew, who is getting married in March.
I really liked these:
but decided that that is one of my favourite places, not my nephew’s. He is more of an upriver boy than a beach boy.
This is a good picture of what things look like round here, and I like the swans:
but that’s downiver country, not upriver country.
In the end I bought Tom this:
and will pick it up tomorrow.
Your friend appears to be quite an artist. I like the second one the most, it reminds me of a beach not to far from me, though mine is probably much much colder. Lovely wedding gift too.
He is a very talented chap. He used to be a farrier and rodeo champion; his grandmother taught him to paint landscapes while he was laid up with a broken femur. The outcome of treatment for his broken femur was bad enough that he couldn’t continue in the rodeos or with farriering, so he took to painting landscapes professionally.
And he has made a good living at it, put four kids through school and uni. Part of the secret is that he makes each painting work hard — he sells the original in oils, a couple of hundred framed prints of the more popular paintings, and greeting cards. One of his tricks is to do paintings of the scenery in popular holiday spots and hang them, or prints, for sale, in restaurants &c. The restaurateurs get free decoration and a commission, he gets a flood of sales.
And then, when I look at his website I am amazed at just how many paintings he has made. 35 years of work mounts up.