The story of how a one-time house painter attempted to become an “artist” never entered my head until an observant neighbor sent me a thought-provoking email, one that prompts me to tell you this story.

It started earlier this month when I posted a photo of the Christmas lights decorating my balcony. I realized that one could look beyond the balcony and see into my apartment through the double set of sliding doors and check out parts of my living room/dining room, but I thought nothing would come of that. Click here for that view.

Did you notice the multicolored painting with bands of different colors? Well, Michael, who lives nearby in this apartment complex did. He emailed me after seeing the post, saying: “Through your glass doors, I see a “Frank Stella”. Poster, print or canvas? It is a classic Stella image and beautiful.” Did you notice the authority in Michael’s words? I did. He obviously knew plenty about Frank Stella, and likely art in general.

The work Michael saw on my wall was indeed a Stella image, one I had painted after seeing it on the cover of a medical journal. Mine wasn’t a hopeless project. I had worked with a professional painting crew during my early college days, painting new houses and learning a bit about mixing colors. I also had a steady enough hand to draw straight lines, and this work of Stella’s (Sacramento Mall Proposal #4) has more straight lines than I care to count.

Stella’s version is big, stretching over 8 1/2 feet on each side, and much bigger than anything I wanted to hang on my wall, so I settled for a canvas about half that size, roughly a 4 foot square. I gave the entire canvas a coat of white paint and then sketched the pattern in pencil so both the major and minor bands of color would become miniature version of Stella’s.

Using acrylic paints, I mixed the colors one by one and painted the thicker bands free hand, starting with the red square in the center, and then moving progressively outward with each different color up to the final brown. Next, I added the thinner bands onto the white background, each band getting darker as I moved outward. I used a small brush this part and was very careful to keep the edges as straight as possible.

The result? It was a colossal disaster! My effort looked terrible. it looked blah, it looked nothing like Stella’s, even though my colors matched his reasonably well. The problem slowly came into focus. I finally recognized that my blunder was my white lines. They were too thin, barely visible and not bold enough to separate the different colors, not able to add any sparkle to the painting.

The solution was obvious, and it made me sick. Every one of the white lines needed to be widened. And there were so, so many. I thought of the time that would take for me to painstakingly widen each line with my tiny brush. I wondered whether it would be worth the effort, whether I should just toss the piece into the trash.

Then common sense arrived. Why not use tape to define the limits of each white line? I bought a roll of masking tape, masked one complete side of the painting at a time, slapped white paint between rows of masking tape, and in about an hour I finished the whole thing.

To come back to Michael, I’ve known that he is a financial advisor who has a post-graduate degree in economics, an occupation I couldn’t connect with his obvious knowledge of Frank Stella, and presumably other art as well. I was truly puzzled. So I emailed him with questions. Had he studied art formally? Did he also paint?

It pays to ask questions. Yes, Michael has a broad knowledge of art. Many years ago, he told me, he had owned an art gallery. He had bought and sold art in Switzerland and Germany. And yes, he also does what he called “some amateur painting.” He sent photos of some of his interesting work. Another benefit of blogging, I thought, learning more about other people.

To wrap this up this story of a one-time house painter, I’ll add that mimicking Stella wasn’t my first attempt at being a copy cat.  Years before I had seen a reproduction of a composition by Alberto Magnelli that I liked, so I painted my version of that one in oil.

And I even did one more about a dozen years ago, this one being a copy of The Sun by Edvard Munch, a huge mural in Oslo University’s assembly hall. This one has more curlicues and other wrinkles than the others.

That’s all for today, the story of a one-time house painter’s artistic attempts as he tried his best to put matching colors on canvas. Too bad I didn’t know there were websites designed for guys just like me. See here.

Have a Happy New Year! See you in 2023. Stay tuned.