Daring all the rainchecks and warrantees of the heart

This time of year with spring so close at hand, I seem to run into thoughts along the path to Old Port Clyde that are like ghost notes left in trees and bushes for me to forage out and fathom through. I'll read them like the signs they are as I come across them; put them in my pocket and take 'em home to kindle a fire later that evening as I sit and go over them again at the end of the day. Notes, & signs, mostly notes from the muse to say I'm on the right track. It's when I don't get those little notes I know I have to re-trace my steps 'til I do get back on again. In essence these little notes are my little reminders for me to keep in the attitude of gratitude. Keep an open mind and heart.

And follow.

Yesterday as I sat by the sea at Marshall Point Light while the sun set on the day, I got into a deeply grateful place inside of myself that I can only externally express ever so slightly through any amount of writing or painting pictures about it. I'm just another human being going about my business who sometimes has a low threshold for beauty, that's all. It's quite beautiful here along this part and parcel of the coastline and it doesn't matter how cold it is, or how it seems the weight of the world gets a little too heavy to shoulder sometimes, and you want it all to slip away for a little while. Take a walk, look around, be thankful to live in such a beautiful place with all it's changing light in the mornings, during the day, or in the evening. I know I never tire of it. I can look back over the day and say I had a great day painting. I got lost in it from time to time, which is the absolute best I can ask for. That and I learned a lot about how I'm going to proceed from here with the picture I'm working on, and in the next few I want to get started on here shortly. I am grateful I am supported to be able to do this; a lot of artists aren't in their lifetimes, most, really, that's just a fact.

So what's below is a poem I wrote to go with a picture I painted in a not-so-long-ago-once-upon-a-time that had my mother in it scuttling along in a winter flurry of snow and beating feet for home from the "Port Clyde General". It all came from a wisp of a memory fetched out of the slipstream. Not too long after I painted it, it got sold, and in a one-of-a-kind way that paintings "are", can never be re-captured again. Of course like a grocer, an artist needs to sell his artwork to put bread on the table and keep the home fires burning. Still, selling your paintings is an odd business sometimes, and no matter how many years I've been doing this it seems sometimes between painting them and exhibiting them I never get to quite live with some of them "long enough". I don't have time to go into it here, but there have been many times where I've lived with them "raising them" them like a child and watching them develop and progress, and then I SELL THEM! Mein Gott! I've SOLD MY Fricken' CHILD! Now THERE'S a feelin' for ya!

At any rate in the painting, my mother's back is to the viewer as she's headed in between the white Baptist church and the Balano tenement where we used to live in Port Clyde. She's only a few steps from pulling open that storm door and putting the groceries down on the counter in the kitchen as she comes in, and closes the cold out. I think of the "doors" of things often, the way they open to things, or close out other things. I've done a lot of paintings of doors and windows, and being on the "outside looking in".

A Port Clyde Memoir

A penny for your thoughts:

Daylight savings time comes around
Dark as a pocket before 4 o'clock by Christmas.
Snow and sleet mix --- stings the face
driven by the wind.

A plow truck goes rattling by
keeping the way clear for what little traffic comes through.

Port Clyde, main st.

My mother comes home from the store. . .
Balano tenement years ---
grocery bags sopping wet.
("Nealy's," we called it then, after Nealy Morse who owned it).

My mother would walk down through the village main st.,
puffing on her Camel cigarette. . .
she'd stand in the lee of the Advent Church
half way to and from "Nealy's".
Just another shadow now amongst many,
mixed with sleet and snow and the smell of salt sea air
on a winter's night.

Update on "Self portrait being a teen-age Neil Diamond, rockin' the shack & Port Clyde roads"

Of the two photographs here, the composition above was taken on the 25th of January, before I left for the Outsider Art Fair in NYC. The one below I took yesterday, so a month has elapsed. In the meantime I've started and completed other paintings of course, while this one gets worked on, evolves, dries, and otherwise gets worked on.
Some things you can readily see are different.

The sky over the "co-op road" has cleared up, a lot of the purple has gone and although you can't see it in this picture the lightning striking the tree on "Raspberry Island" is still a strong story telling element of the painting. Cony's shack seems to be the dividing place between the "dark brooding side" and the "bright side" of the road. Just an observation. Don't know if it's true or will even stay true. Not worried about it at any rate. The "story" just unfolds.

The bald eagle has a lot more definition as it comes flying up the road. There's a Great Blue Heron on the cabin of my father's boat that's starting to come into the picture that you can see in the bottom photograph, that wasn't there in the top one.

I added some sand to the white paint that's constituting the whites of "Cony's shack." There's a rose bush to the left of Cony's shack now, and there's a bottle of Cracklin' Rose wine beginning to appear in front of that rose bush in the grass. I was surprised to see that, but it makes sense, even though I was thinking to put a few "cold ones", you know a few PBR's there. Well, next time. "Cracklin' Rose" was a number one hit for Neil Diamond in August of 1970, but Crackling Rose the wine, was a kind of bogus basically "bum wine" not too far removed from Annie Green Springs, Reunite, Ripple, Cold Duck, Thunderbird, Boone's Farm or MD 20/20. Any of the afore mentioned strictly suitable for winos and teen age under age consumption, where beggars can't be choosers.

The two pot buoys are my father's buoy colors. If you think about it, there's a lot of "twos" in the painting. Two cats, two birds. The "duality" if you will of the self portrait also being a teen age Neil Diamond. Two in one. Well, the radio on the front step in front of the door of the shack used to be in the window up above, but I didn't like it there, so I moved it down. I'm tinkering with the idea of turning it into a phonograph. But it's just a notion, right now.

In "todays version" of the painting you can also see that I've worked on the island "Raspberry Island " at the end of the "co-op road". Also Hupper's Island is more in focus. At the end of the road I've re-placed the building that WAS there, with a "bait truck", hence giving an "unobstructed view" to Raspberry Island. The two old cats (and they are "old" scruffy mangy ones, kind-a wharf-cats) are getting ready to fall on their "manna from heaven" or in this case a few fish that fell off a bait truck from heaven, on the way down to Giant Davis' bait house that used to be at the end of the road. "There's plenty for all".
It occurs to me as well, just incidentally that my father, "Old Cony" taught me a game of "Old Cat" which was an evidentally popular sort of scrub town ball kind of game amongst the kids growing up in Friendship at the turn of the 1900's. Old Cony told me they often didn't have a baseball like how we know a baseball today; it was often a few "old socks" wrapped tightly together. The number of players in the game determined the number of bases. Hence "1-old cat", "2-old cat", etc.

Well at any rate, the LP (also known as an "album"), in the lower left hand corner is evolving as well. The LP is what is going to "contain" the written material that I'm going to put on the front of the painting, since this is an oil painting on canvas, and I don't care so much to put any writing on the back of a canvas. Not that I won't , because I have and do, it's just the way this painting is going to work out.

Other than that you can now see the Port Clyde America Flag on the side of the building there, which you can't see in the photo that's up above, because it was badly cropped, (and well, it was just barely in there in the one up above anyway). The old wooden lobster traps have gone from a more "newish" look they used to have when they were wooden to a more settled and weathered grey look.

I've also been tinkering with the window in the shack, & extended it. I'm truly not satisfied with it. That's my mother and my father in the window. Something is going to change in the window pretty soon.

cwo

Down through the hands of our gospel elders, I have come to realize. . .or, it's not the size o' the cup, but how hot the coffee stays. . .

Seen through the eyes of innocence. . . .



"When I was young. . .when I was just "this tall" knee high to a grass hopper, with no extra to spare, but just a little shaver going about things with little shaver ways . . who would know. . .who would ever suspect, I would close my eyes and dream of all of these things".





My Father and my mother. . .and if you look close enough. . .

". . . when I was young sitting in the top of the world at Cony's shack and the rain was pattering on the roof like the footsteps of thousands of angels, how could I know anything else other than all was well with the world. . .in innocence, all innocence, through the eyes of a child . . . . .how it is sometimes I think of how easily I could go back to that old fish shack door: "Cony's. . ."
I'd lift that rusty old latch and open it and step into that other world again. Hear again the soft hiss of the rain on the roof and the water. . .the cove. . .the sea. . .
Listen for those voices I grew up hearing, knowing and loving. . .being all the while every blessed moment thankful to hear them again.

"Compass me back. . ."

If you live long enough, you get to see how everything is a curse and a blessing. The trick is to keep rising above -- that's all there is to it, and that's all there ever is to it, in my never to be so humble opion. To keep yourself open to the blessing, because when you don't, you become a victim. And as much as I love Port Clyde, don't think I haven't thought of walking away from it. I think the best of us have, who have walked those Port Clyde roads; that were born and bred down there, and some do, and some don't. It's the love/hate thing maybe. But try and put me on the spot about it, and I get contrary about it. I dunno. It doesn't matter. It pretty much boils down to how you can take the boy out-a Port Clyde America, but there's no takin' the Port Clyde America, out-a the boy. It's a connection that can't be broken. There is this need in me to keep connected, that's all I know.


So, tell me, who'd have thunk it? Who indeed, in their wild-est dreams, that this place -- "Old Cony's" fish-shack -- humble as all get out, would have become the place of such fertility for me.

It's the place where it all began.

Even though the place is long gone from the physical world. . . torn down for the sake of progress over an eye-sore by the cove I grew up on, I come back to it over and over again, in my minds eye. Here I am to chase it down, and capture it again, in the wind, and the rain, and the snow, and the sunshine. Season in, season out. In writing or in paint -- ''In sickness and in health" -- HA!" -- more POWER TO 'EM these stardust ephemeral things that we call memories. Paintings, writings, you do it anyway, because it's what YOU CAN DO, and after awhile if you do it long enough, it becomes your life's work. I can't walk away from it, and I can't walk out. I got no choice. My paintings as are my writings are my bit of dream chasing, I guess. And just how do you chase a dream, exactly? There's probably just as many answers to that question as there are dreamers to dream. So you just go for it. How do you even catch onto it, much less hold it, you ask? Well again, that's up to you. Just remember, such things are made out of stardust in your hand, and may well be as fragile as a fire-fly caught by you as a child in the early days of spring. Home is where the heart is, so they say. It's a story as old as time, and still reaches out to comfort us. We all chase that elusive love. . . and we have it all the while.

"Old Cony", well, that's how I think of him, so that's what I call him. He's my father. Floyd Benjamin Conant, is his full real name. He is the son of Benjamin D. Conant and Grace Nevada Hussey, both out of Friendship, Maine, just across the St. George River. I am the son of "Old Cony" and Annie Dodge Oakes. Annie, " Old Cony" and I lived above "Old Cony's" fish-shack on Fisherman's Cove on what is now the co-op road, Port Clyde America. It's the place where I'd look out the window across the cove toward Monhegan Island, a straight shot out the mouth of the harbor. It's the place by that window up above the wharf there, where I sat on the tall wooden stool and dreamed. It's the place where I grew up. I was fresh as a fish out of Rockland General Hospital when my father and mother brought me down route 131 and they set up housekeeping up a-top the fish shack that was to be my home for the first 6 years of my life.The weathered shack is home, through the wildest driving seasons, and the calm sun warmed days of the heart. Some days it feels like it must have felt in Avalon, I think. "Old Cony's" fish shack, the cove, the sea just out beyond the harbor of Port Clyde. It has become the central point that informs my art as much as anything I know. "Old Cony's" fish shack. . . even though it isn't much to look at, it is one of the eldest of my muses.

Ok, that's all she wrote.


cwo

" A tiny soliloquy for Annie"

My mother,
Annie Dodge Oakes
Nov. 15, 1920 - Feb. 23, 1992
____________________________________

There are not really ANY words I can usefully come up with to tell you or otherwise convey how it's the weirdest feeling in the world to lose the person that brought you into it. Funeral parlors ought to have a bar serving straight shots to keep you "likkered right up" to get you through it; because it's such a shock to the system experience as it is -- to "go orphaned" in the world. It's even weirder still when they've been gone for longer than you even knew 'em for. Gets ya where you live, sometimes. God love 'em, too, there are days that come around where the feeling comes over you unbidden where you'd do just about anything to hear their voice again. Or just to sit and have a talk. . the talk could be about anything, "the weather, even" it doesn't matter. So today, my mother's been gone 15 whole years, which is more or less the "half-way" point of the time we had together mother and soning it over in Port Clyde. Amazing. Thoroughly, amazing. These little anniversaries are called euphemistically... "mile stones". My father, "Old Cony", has been gone since 1971. He died in the wee hours of the mornin' on the day after my mother's birthday -- like he just hung on those few extra friggen hours by the skin of his teeth, so he wouldn't have to stand accused of givin' up the ghost for her birthday. I'm just kiddin' -- but you know, I do kind-a secretly wonder -- in the "what WAS THAT ALL ABOUT" way -- the one when you put your hand up to cover most of your face, all the while peering out through your fingers. Although "being on the outside lookin' in" is a whole different story than being on the "inside lookin' out" -- son of Annie and Cony, or no son of Annie and Cony; I'm pretty sure their love affair had grown cold as a dock plank in January, or in this case, February, by then. They passed each other on the street like they were "over it" those couple of times I saw them on the main street going about doing whatever it was they were doing at the time. My mother going to the the "Port Clyde General", "Old Cony" to the post office. What-ever. By then Cony's fish house on the cove where we lived along what is now the "co-op" road was in pretty sad shape; holes in the roof and windows busted out of it. "Old Cony" was in kind of a similar state of being, himself, stiverin' around the Port Clyde streets. By then he was roomin' at the "Ocean House" and my mother and I were living beside the Baptist church in one of the Balano tenements. At any rate he didn't seem to come around so much anymore and sing "Turkey in the straw", like he used to. No-sir-ree. I was just about 15 years old when ''Old Cony'' died, and in my 36th year when my mother did. Of course "Old Cony" was born in 1900, and my mother in 1920; so there was a little "discrepancy" to begin with, since "Old Cony" would have been 56 and my mother would have been 36 when they had me. I'll be 51 when this August rolls around, which is about 5 years short of how old "Old Cony" when he became a proud pappy. Makes you wonder the twists and turns of one's fate, and how it doesn't matter what condition your condition is at the time. If they hadn't have by destiny met and been lead, I wouldn't have been here to tell the story. And that would have kind-a sucked, since all told it's been a pretty damn good life in spite of how I can be my own worst enemy sometimes. All I can say in this introspective moment I'm having today, is as I look back, I often was blind that another's passing isn't the end of a relationship, but in a greater sense, the beginning of a more enduring one; one that's got some real substance and power to it, if we let it in.



cwo

Of "Night Air", ancestral love ballads, and Port Clyde wolfs (sic) singin' 'round the door. . .

"'When he paints wolves in the streets and fields of Port Clyde, one can hear the wolf at his own mother's door. . . ' "

David Grima, from his March 30, 2006 article on Charles Wilder Oakes, in Rockland's Courier-Gazette entitled: "Reaching New York."

"Night Air," 2006 Oil on paper, 22 x 30 in.
Private Collection, Denver, CO.


I did a drawing this morning for a new "wolf painting;" one in the vein of "Night Air," that was sold at the Outsider Art Fair in New York City a year or so ago. . . but it is a different one of course, and in it's own way "demanding," because of all the details I envision coming about in it. It didn't take long to fathom it's going to have to be bigger than the 22 x 30 inch paper format that I've done for the wolf paintings in the past. I'm thinking instead of being done on paper, this one will in all likely-hood be done on canvas or panel. It would look a little like this:

A lonesome moon shadow besotted brook goes to the cove, like how it is near "Johnny's Wharf" on Horse Point Road in Port Clyde. Two Wolfs (sic) survey the scene. No shortage of woods to head off into should it be necessary. There's a few fish shacks sitting cold and blue hued on the left over dish of moonlight shining down on the Port Clyde wharfs, heavy set now with lobster gear that's being brought ashore. Just beyond, the fishing boats sit snugly moored in the lee for the night, in safe harbor. All is clear. We see a big white ghost birch tree, festooned with autumn leaves and below that there's a plethora of pot buoys that washed up in the cove over the summer. The buoys are strung up like Christmas ornaments, dangling here, there, and everywhere. In behind the white ghost birch tree sits a salt water farm house, with the light on, inviting and warm; because home is where the heart is. In the mid-ground far enough away from the wolfs, there's a Blue Crane Heron standing stalk still in silhouette where the stream meets the mud flats. He's waitin' on his evenin' meal to make a slip up and come in too close. All is quiet and still except for there's an old gramophone outside the farm house ell. It is cranking some old well worn scratchy "parlor music" tune (probably that old time tune "Red Wing", that was all the rage at the turn of the 1900's). All the musical notes waft up the side of the ell of the building and join above the roof to become a birch bark canoe stranded (and lurching slightly) on the chimbley (sic) top. In the canoe there stands a Native American Indian and his maiden, (who is seated) and she is with child. She has one eye open, and one closed. Can you tell me, is it a "wink", or is it a secret side of fate, she's conveying? He is standing up in the canoe and has his tomahawk embedded in the wily ol' harvest moon. He's single handedly hauling them along up to the moon on a stream of an almost misty curling current of pungent wood smoke. Another Blue Crane Heron is sitting in the front of the canoe, like some wise old grizzled pilot bird that he is.

cwo

"Port Clyde's Renegade Painter," from February, 2007 Down East Magazine

Outside, Looking in
The paintings of Charles Wilder Oakes reflect a hard-knock life lived with humor and gusto.
Michaela Cavallaro, Portrait by Benjamin Magro






Welcome to the house art built," Charles Wilder Oakes says, climbing the steps to his home at the head of Harrington Cove in Spruce Head. But he's not just referring to artistic touches like the mosaic of a leafy vine he laid into the floor surrounding the wood stove or the attractive way in which he turned salvaged decking lumber into floorboards.

No, Oakes is referring to the fact that, for much of his fifty years, he survived by bartering his dense, fantastical oil paintings of life in Port Clyde for whatever else he needed -- some backhoe work to dig out a pond in his front yard, his red Chevy Cheyenne pickup truck, his RCA refrigerator. He even traded a painting for a portion of the funeral expenses when his beloved, irascible mother died in 1992.

The barter deals were necessary because, unlike many struggling artists, Oakes is unwilling to put his painting on the back burner while he earns a living. "He's sacrificed a hell of a lot to be an artist," says Dona Bergen, whose Mars Hall Gallery in Port Clyde represents Oakes. "He's lived in poverty for many, many years to do what he wants to do."

But the days of digging returnable bottles out of snowbanks for grocery money are quickly receding into the distance for Oakes. (His paintings now sell between $650 to $28,000.) Thanks to intervention from a few well-connected patrons -- Bergen being one of them -- Oakes' career is poised to take off. For the second year in a row, he will show paintings at the Outsider Art Fair in New York City -- last year, all five of the pieces he showed sold quickly. This year, he's got a larger space at the fair, as well as a one-man show at a nearby gallery that runs into early February.

It's pretty heady stuff for the kid who grew up poor in a shack on the edge of Port Clyde Harbor. But Oakes seems to be taking it all in stride. He notes that he kicked a pretty powerful drinking problem last year -- "I was drinking fifteen to nineteen sixteen-ounce PBRs every night and still painting," he says, shaking his head in wonder. Oakes' first can of Pabst Blue Ribbon -- and quite a few after that -- came courtesy of his uncle Walt Anderson, the fisherman and local character who was a muse and model for Andrew Wyeth [Down East, September 2001]. Though Oakes kept the carousing up for years, last spring he went through an introspective period. "I spent a lot of time putting the house and land together; it's a metaphor for putting me back together," he says. "I could see I've got to quit drinking, I've got to trust that the paintings are going to come. Walking through that, it feels like I've been richly rewarded."

Ralph Saltus, a New Yorker who has summered in Maine since the early 1970s, feels strongly that Oakes' moment has come. Saltus first saw Oakes' work a few years ago and has since taken him under his wing, not only buying three of his paintings but also talking up his work in Manhattan and eventually making the connections that led to Oakes' inclusion in the Outsider Art Fair. "He has, to my mind, one of the most thoroughly original styles and folk inspirations and color I've seen in many years," Saltus says. "He's entirely genuine; he's not affected at all. His paintings are from a wellspring of many experiences in Port Clyde, with the best and the worst that's gone on there."


Oakes knew early on that he wanted to draw and paint. A book that he and Bergen are compiling of his work -- Oakes writes stories, essays, and poems that go along with many of his paintings -- includes some of his earliest drawings, such as a pen sketch, dated 1973, of a mouse hole as seen from the inside. Even at age seventeen, Oakes was creating intricately, detailed images that reward the patient viewer. His early attraction to the artistic lifestyle is evident in the motto he chose to run next to his senior portrait in the yearbook: "A poet of life, a painter of beauty, and a minstrel of love."

Margaret Lewis, an art lover and a selectwoman in nearby St. George, took an early interest in Oakes, picking up art supplies for him and signing him up for art classes. While Oakes says he's thoroughly indebted to Lewis -- "She was as much a savior as a patron," he notes -- the art classes didn't exactly take. "It was snotty, highbrow summer people trying to teach this local street urchin about art. But I didn't follow what they wanted," he says.

Indeed, Oakes' vision is singularly his own, rooted as it is in the particulars of his personal history. The Ex-Wives' Clambake, for example, really does feature all three of Oakes' former spouses, although he notes with a grin that the two women in the center appear a bit more amply endowed in the painting than they do in real life. Every detail in the thirty-six inch by forty-eight inch painting is significant; the buoy in the foreground, for example, displays Oakes' father's colors, despite bearing his mother's name. ("You might say my mother and him jumped the fence," he says, explaining that he wasn't given his father's last name since, inconveniently, the man was married to someone other than his mother.) A bait bag just like the one in the tree hangs in Oakes' second-floor studio, and the burgee that says "Herring Gut" is both a nod to painter William Thon and a reference to Port Clyde's original name.

"I probably try to pack a little too much into each painting," he admits. "One of my ex-wives used to say to me, 'You've painted five paintings into that one -- now go get us some money.' "

Though The Ex-Wives' Clambake was finished in 2004, Oakes continues to tinker with it. He recently built a ten-inch wide frame for it that includes a mosaic border constructed out of glass and broken pottery he found in the cove where he grew up. "It's likely that some of this stuff came from my folks' house -- it's likely something my mother broke over my father's head," he says, clearly pleased with the possibility.

In paintings that Oakes has begun more recently, the writing has begun to move from the back to the front, to become more integrated with his colorful, slightly off-kilter depictions of day-to-day life in the Port Clyde of his youth, a place where existence isn't easy but where good humor and a certain mysticism are pervasive. "I call this stuff a bootleg version of folk art," he says.

Bootleg or not, Oakes' work is easy to appreciate, even if the life that inspired the work had its grim moments. As Ralph Saltus puts it, "It hasn't been easy; he certainly had a colorful childhood. But," Saltus continues, "he portrays it with compassion, with warmth, and with humor where I think many others might grumble."

It's just possible, Oakes thinks, that thirty-five years of stubbornness, hard work, and sacrifice will pay off. "I've stuck to it, wondering if the lights were going to go out," he says wryly. "But I just don't know how to do anything else proper."

Open Letter

An Open Letter to all of you who have asked & to give thanks ---

As part and parcel of a recent article with "Down East Magazine" as well as one on the front page of the Rockland "Free Press", I've had a lot of people asking me to post some of my writings on the web site, and many of you have also asked me about how my newest painting, "Self portrait Being a Teen-age Neil Diamond Rockin' the Shack and Port Clyde Roads" is going. Answer -- I'm really getting into it. Diggin' in. Gettin' in touch with my "inner Neil", so to speak. I've even picked up my guitar again. I wouldn't put it past me that maybe I'll ruffle some of the neighbors fur with a few hot licks this summer -- ha!!

So, listen, I got to thinking that maybe I'll get around to creating a little off-shoot link-space here, or maybe even a blog, and show you all how it is a painting that I do sort of sends out a tap-root, takes consciousness & comes into being. Trust me, it's a pretty unorthodox and funky process. But that's o.k., it's mine, and I don't particularly know how to do it any other way than how I do it. So be it.

Of course, I had very much hoped to have the "Neil - n - me" painting done for the Outsider Art Fair, but it didn't pan out, (with an estimated 80 or so hours left to go on it) and since I'm not in the least inclined to sign a painting until the painting "asks" me to -- for lack of a better way to put it, well, anyway, needless to say, it stayed put here in Maine. Then there's the matter of the frame, which I envision as a whole other she-bang of a process, what with broken records embedded in the frame, maybe some vintage 8 track cassette tapes thrown in and so on . . .so, it's a "distillation", and so with that in mind, what I'm hoping to do is have the little blog or link or whatever, take us right along with the creative process, right from the beginning sketch, to various states along the way of how the painting is coming along.

This present little effort writing here is my "start" toward that end, at any rate.

I'll also put my notes, notions, and ideas from along the way as I'm going, and in the end we'll see what gets left in and what gets left out of the creative dialog. In the meantime, I thank you all kindly for asking about it and I've been really pleased with the response to the articles in both "Down East Magazine" and the "Free Press", and by the way, the "Self portrait Being a Teen-age Neil Diamond Rockin' the Shack and Port Clyde Roads" painting has generated a lot of positive interest in ways I've never quite experienced, or expected. Let's put it this way. . .I never quite conceived of myself as a "portrait artist". . .yet it seems I've arrived there. . .by ummmmm.....let's say: default. But life is sweeter that way, when we least expect something -- don't you think?? Ok , got to run. Remember ---"The best is yet to come". So, if I didn't see you at my one man show -- (and BY THE WAY, many, many thanks to you "from here" who trekked on down and supported me there, and at the Outsider Art Fair), then I'll see you in Maine come February, 2007.

Until then --

Peace,
C. W. O.