by Rowe Smith

Since this is my story (see article in this month’s edition) might I tell you about my first painting sale. Here in this market, any painting sale is important.  This copy is the lead paragraph from a story that ran in the Desert News January 4, 1967.

JUNKYARD TO GALLERY by Clint Barber.
“A while back Mr. Smith had several stacks of sketches he didn’t want any more. He piled a bunch of them in the truck and took them to the city dump. Later, one of his boys was walking home from school with a neighbor boy, and the neighbor asked, ‘does your dad sign his artwork Bill Smith?’ The Smith boy answered yes ‘Well my mother bought one of them for 20 cents at the junkyard.’

The tender at the junkyard had found some of the sketches and sold one to the neighbor boy’s mother when she took some trash to the yard. The thing that made me mad, Mr. Smith joked, is it made me a professional, and I wanted to keep amateur status for a while longer.”

This bit from Clint Barber’s article could well be my Andy Warhol fifteen minutes of fame. Shortly after my wife and I returned to our native Salt Lake, I hung an exhibit in the Tenth East Senior Center. I had no recent work to hang since most of those done over the years are in our children’s homes. I had not done a watercolor for a considerable time and discovered it is not like riding a bicycle, where you never forget.

Never forgetting just isn’t true with painting. I fished out my pallet of dried up paint and started a series of watercolors. Whenever one appeared good enough, or almost good enough, to frame, I titled it, ACCIDENT 1, ACCIDENT 2, and so on.  There is a lesson here so let me encourage all of you who read this.  “Get your paint out, paint, and paint, and paint some more – there is a masterpiece waiting  in you to be painted. Or you might find your Andy Warhol fifteen minutes of fame.”

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UTAH’S ART MAGAZINE SINCE 2001, 15 Bytes is published by Artists of Utah, a 501 (c) 3 non-profit organization headquartered in Salt Lake City, Utah.