Stowaway
Egg Tempera on panel
36 x 52 inches
What memories are locked inside these ancient travelers? In this painting the artist simply personified this time worn suitcase and dome top steamer trunk that likely had similar tales to tell that together had been stashed in his attic along with other objects associated with his past. The peeling, tattered decals provide us with a glimpse of the events and places visited on their travels. These emblems of the American Legion Convention of 1927 held in Paris, of hotels such as the Hohmann's Hotel in Germany and the Little Regina Hotel in Paris along with those of the Cunard Lines, the oldest shipping company in the country, become a visual diary and offer the Zeitgeist of the time as well as a lifeline to the present. Why even the Beatles stayed at the Gresham Hotel in Dublin. Cunard Lines is now Carnival Cruise Lines. What is it about certain visual images that allow us to voyage into the past? Perhaps reading that Homer himself had crossed the Atlantic on the Parthia, a steamship of the Cunard Lines, got the artist thinking of all of the "Stowaways" that may have accompanied these very pieces of luggage across the ocean.
First Prize
80th National Midyear Exhibition
Butler Institute of American Art
Louise C. Nemeth Memorial Award
63rd Annual Exhibition
National Exhibition of Painters in Casein & Acrylic