Eric

While I was standing uneasily in the center of the gallery, summer before last, at one of the Friday night receptions for one of the monthly juried exhibits of the Watercolor Art Society – Houston (WAS-H), I noticed an elderly gentleman staring at me from across the room. I had only recently joined this organization and this was one of my first times to submit a painting for competition. None of the three paintings that I entered won an award, however all three were selected to be hung in the show.

The man walked over and introduced himself as Erik Sprohge. I recognized the name as one of the artist that had won an award that night. After we talked for a few minutes, we realized that when I was head of the Houston office of an architectural and engineering firm, he had done a number of the architectural renderings of some of our projects. Then he said, “ Would you like to join the Geriatric Art Society, which we call the GAS boys?” He explained that it was a group of guys, mostly retired, that do watercolor paintings and go on paintings trips together twice a year, once in the spring and once in the fall. Since I was recently retired and was trying to do watercolor paintings again, that sounded like just the group that I would enjoy being with.

My first trip with them was to Nacogdoches, Texas, in October of last year. That is where I took a picture of some canna flowers that got me started doing flower paintings. In April of this year we went to Rockport, Texas, and earlier this month, we met in St. Francisville, Louisana.

Here lately, I have been thinking about trying my hand at doing drawings and paintings of people. The week before going to St. Francisville, I did a pencil portrait drawing of one of the GAS guys named Tom Clements. He is quite a character and our official Cajun joke teller. I gave this portrait drawing to Tom in one of our meetings in St. Francisville and he seemed very pleased with it. While there, at every opportunity, I took photographs of the members in the hopes of maybe doing a watercolor portrait painting.

Several of the photographs show promise. I chose one of Erik to be my first attempt at doing a watercolor portrait painting. In this painting, I chose to let the need for the right color in the composition overrule trying to get an exact likeness of Eric, so in this portrait, he has more of a sun tan than he normally has, however I was pleased with the results. I think it is going to be fun doing these people paintings. So, the next time you see me and I am pointing a camera at you, who knows, you may be the subject of my next painting and story..