My mother could draw. She did colored sketches of birds in her youth. They were quiet good, but she never really continued in the arts. In her adult years she took up the hobby of painting, but she only did it using those "Paint-by-Number" kits once popular.
Perhaps others before her had taken up pens or brushes, but The Kid knew nothing of this. The Old Goat's not sure when The Kid started scribbling anything that looked like something. Maybe it began with the painting on the left.
The Kid was nine-years-old when it was done. It was a school assignment to illustrate something we learned in history. Are you wondering what it is and how it represents anything historic? It's a train, one of the early passenger trains. We had learned these trains powered by steam burned wood and coal to heat the boiler. Passengers, except those wealthy enough to afford coaches, would sit on seats fasted to open flat cars. As the train steamed along ash and hot particles would spew down on the passengers in these open seats from the engine stack, which is what the painting depicts.
The teacher thought the piece good enough to put up on display.
Actually, maybe The Kid got interested even earlier. Before this painting, a teacher stuck a pack of colored charcoals in his hand and he drew trees. The Kid liked drawing charcoal trees. He drew a forest (well, at least a small grove) worth of charcoal trees. Like the later train painting, this teacher also felt a few of his charcoal trees with worthy of public display.
However it began, The Kid did a lot of drawing and sketching as a child. With the exception of The Steam Train, the childhood art is lost. Most of what is collected here was done in his late teens and early twenties when he still had the interest.
The photography all came from the Old Goat, who got lazy.
