Appreciate the Art of Liverpool's Michael Grad through April
Michael Grad remembers asking his parents for a painting kit when he was 12.
"It had tiny little tubes of paint and a bad brush and canvas boards," Grad recalls.
Fifty years later, here he is the lobby of his hometown public library, hanging nine of his paintings on the wall for the April Art in the Lobby exhibit.
Can Grad still remember what he painted on his very first canas?
"Yes!" he answers. "Typical. A big, orange sun. and trees in the front. It's always a landscape."
The paintings Grad has selected for patrons to view on two lobby walls when they schedule a one-hour LPL Express Visit are extremely colorful.
Grad says he's been painting in this style for about the last 10 years. He picked it up after investigating the internet.
"I actually got reenergized to paint in the last 10 years by Ralph Blakelock, a painter from the Hudson Valley," Grad says. "His work was misty/mystic landscapes. I found it to be a wonderful style. I started to paint like him."
Grad worked with it.
"Now I have my own style," he said.
The first painting in this style holds a special place in his heart.
"A little hut. Swirls," he says. "My own world."
In fact, he picks the painting to stand next to in the photo session for this blog piece.
"I won't say I'm a surrealist," Grad says. "But if you have a guy with two giraffes with a cart with a rhinoceros ... it probably has an ism at the end of it. But I don't know what it is."
