A common figure used by the publication Art Business News and also by publisher B. Eric Rhoads is that Americans in the top one percent of earnings purchase original art.  This is an exclusive club and many people don’t realize that they can be a member.

Purchasing original art makes economic sense.  It can be for investment or it can be just for your own pleasure.  I address this differentiation in my free publication: “The Top 12 Mistakes People Make in Purchasing Art” which is available when you sign up for my blog. Investment or pleasure, either way owning an original piece, one that is not a copy or a print, is the hallmark of that portion of society that recognizes the unique, the one-of-a-kind.  They own something that was produced by hand, not run off in infinite copies from a machine.  It’s a piece of beauty that is uniquely yours. You don’t see it on every one of your friends’ walls.  And therefore it makes you unique as well.

Because of my unusual background, my art is unique as well.  When I was of an age to enroll in art school, contemporary art was all non-representational.  This is not what I personally wanted to produce.  Instead, I put my art career on the back-burner and pursued a course in the natural sciences.  I have a Bachelor’s of Science in Microbiology from Purdue University and a Master’s of Science in Microbiology from the University of Nebraska, Lincoln.  I worked in cancer research for one year at Baylor College of Medicine.  Following that, I worked in product development for the industrial water treatment industry for eleven years until my company decided to reorganize. I wasn’t interested in the direction they decided to go and so I retired.

What does this have to do with art?  The basic biology curriculum at Purdue included zoology which later helped me with anatomy when drawing the figure.  And the years in research resulted in my having 42 United States Patents for the removal of microbiological growth in industrial water systems.  Quite a lot of creativity went into those patents such as computerizing the assay the company was using and perfecting it so that results would be repeatable.  We went from running one assay with all the subsequent calculations per week to, with two technicians, running four a day complete with calculations, in duplicate to prove the results were not a fluke.  That’s creativity – and organization.

I take those skills to running an on-line art business.

As for my classical art training, in lieu of a degree program which didn’t speak to my ambitions, I searched out workshops and individual instructors who would teach me the necessary skills.  Some of those artist instructors are:

Paula Adams: Drawing, Watercolors

Janie Gildow: Colored Pencil Workshop

Abdelwahab Noor: Realistic water colors

John Bayalis Hyperrealist Watercolor Painting, on-line course via Wetcanvas

Anna Dudchenko: Portrait Drawing, Painting in the Style of the Impressionists, Oil Painting, Small group instruction to the present

Mohammed Al Ma’amri: Drawing, Oil Painting

Saud Al Hunaini: Drawing, Oil Painting, Oil Painting private student to the present

I have been commissioned for portraits.

I have also been asked to create museum exhibitions for the Centre of Omani Dress in their effort to stop “looking like a stuffy museum” and to “artistically display the collection in a pleasing fashion”.  Bait Al Zubair Corporation, Julia Al Zadjali Founder and Director of the COD.