“Be obsessed or be average.” -Grant Cardone |
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Painting is easy when you don't know how, but very difficult when you do. -Edgar Degas
Top of Elephant Rocks 18X18 Oil on Canvas
Here’s my secret to creating a painting. Pour myself glass of port. Lay in the sky and clouds. Mix burnt sienna, Naples yellow, with a spot of cadmium red. Test it. Nice Rock color. Pour more port. Pick the paint up with a 2-inch brush and lay it down as the underpainting. Watch the drips. Try again with a little burnt umber added to give the rocks shape. More red, and that stuff over there in a jar? Pour another glass of port. Yeah… No? Wipe it down and start over again... maybe better this time. Stop... Sip... Paint. Maybe add white for the highlights? Maybe…
“Don’t think about making art, just get it done. Let everyone else decide if it’s good or bad, whether they love or hate it. While they are deciding, make even more art.” Andy Warhol
| Wintering Elephant Rocks 15X30 Acrylic on canvas |
| "So Garry, just how long have you been an Artist?" Since the day I could scribble with a pencil or a crayon. I have a photo of myself with a Kodak Brownie hanging around my neck when I was nine. I took my camera everywhere. When I was a high school senior I illustrated a student literary book with my drawings. I loved being a student photographer. It gave me the opportunity to get out of class to take photos of other students and activities for the yearbook. |  |
| A camera in my hands was like wearing a protective coat of armor. Photography helped me to overcome my shyness, approach other students, especially girls, and develop relationship skills that many students don’t learn until later in life. Photography also helped me to develop a life-long love for the outdoors, nature and the Missouri/Arkansas Ozarks in particular. Today the American landscape is an integral part of my art. Our clear running streams and green-forested hills are a treasure to behold and a challenge to paint. I plan to take photos and paint until the day I die. How long do you plan to be an artist?  |
| Wintering Elephant Rocks If you want to have Elephant Rocks State Park all to yourself then explore it in the winter. A unique granite geological formation found in the St. Francis Mountains of the Missouri Ozarks. There is nothing quite like this rock-strewn landscape anywhere else in Missouri or Mid-America. Giant boulders of pink granite rocks thrown all over the landscape and hardwood forest. Throughout the centuries green and gray lichens and mosses have only added to their shape, texture and color. |
Like a sandcastle, all is temporary. Build it,
tend it, enjoy it. And when the time comes let it go.
– Jack Kornfield
| Rock Castle 30X30 Oil on Canvas |
| This is more than a cairn. It’s a Rock Castle I found late one evening on Lake Superior's rocky shore. I love the makers creative design. This person is building more than a cairn, they are building a dream. Unfortunately, as a photographer, I found the late evening light disappointing. I photographed it anyway, but later, when creating this painting I changed the lighting to bring out the textures and shapes of the stacked rocks. The art of this cairn builder inspired me. I consider Rock Castle to be a collaboration with another artist I've never met. |
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Rock, Paper Scissors 30x30 Oil on Canvas |
It’s very simple. Look, scissors cuts paper, paper covers rock, rock crushes lizard, lizard poisons Spock, Spock smashes scissors, scissors decapitates lizard, lizard eats paper, paper disproves Spock, Spock vaporizes rock, and as it always has been rock crushes scissors. -The Big Bang Theory |
| That’s not very simple. Maybe life is becoming too complex for me. A phone ringing in my pocket, a wrist watch that monitors my heart, and all that crap on “social media”. And on television, a show about really brainy people who don’t have enough sense to know when to come out of the rain. What happened to a simple walk in the woods, or reading a newspaper while sitting on a toilet? I know the Big Bang Theory is funny, but life is not that complicated. Lord, give me an opportunity to walk in the woods, and build a cairn so others can follow. |
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Cairns represent a trail marker that guides one through uncertain areas of life. They Provide guidance, hope, balance, continuity, and confidence on the journey down the path of life. -John P. Kreamer
| Cairn 1, 14X11, Acrylic on Board |
| Cairns are rocks stacked on top of each other. It takes at least three rocks to make a cairn. All over the world, from ancient times until present, from mountains to deserts and distant coasts, people have built cairns. Sometimes they mark a trail, a significant place or tomb, serve as communication, have a religious meaning or an artistic purpose. Cairns are built with careful effort - they don't just appear randomly in nature. Stones don't drop out of the sky and stack themselves naturally into stable structures. Only man can make a cairn and only man can give it meaning. Supporting Our Dream is a painting of a simple cairn, but I see much more. I envision it as a couple, precariously leaning on each other to support their dream, whether it be a family, children, an adventure, or something special only to them. |
Click Here To purchase Cairn 1
Garry McMichael