Author: Norm Van Maastricht

The Model


This lovely lass turned out to be my most important model now that I think about it. Certainly the one I photographed most.
She would patiently do whatever I asked when I was learning to use my first Nikon camera and some of the shots of her are the best I have ever taken.
Since my paintings used photos for a base it was natural that she was the focus of several attempts.

I believe I made at least four paintings of her. Some came out well… some did not.

I actually sold two that were based on her. She is the only real person, as in ‘person I actually knew’ that was the subject in any of the paintings I have actually sold to date.

This is one of my most commented on paintings when people see a photo of it. It is her head superimposed on a model from an ad I saw in a Cosmo magazine. She did not actually pose for this painting…I’ve never seen her unclothed. But it’s a good capture, I think…

It’s beautiful, to tell the truth…

Even if I do say so myself…

From The Bar ~ Chantilly Lace

websizeAnother segment of a project The Rise and Fall of a Saloon In The Latter Part off The Twentieth Century. These excerpts are not chronological. In fact very little logic prevails… Some of them might even be true…

   Hiring Crew
Job Focus:
The perfect customer space:
A clean table
A clean Ashtray
One drink
One dry napkin
No dead glasses

My Crew Rules were simple:
No drugs or drunkenness on the Job.
Wear What You Want…you know what Looks Good on you…
Gawd HELP you if you show up with chipped nail polish.
“Check your dip.”
Leave Your Lover Home. Don’t Let Your Lover Loiter.

Continue reading “From The Bar ~ Chantilly Lace”

From The Bar ~The Face On The Barroom Floor~

Another segment of a project The Rise and Fall of a Saloon in the Latter Part off The Twentieth Century. These excerpts are not chronological. In fact very little logic prevails…

The Face On The Barroom Floor…

Actually, that’s a poem by Hugh Antoine D’Arcy.

This is more about the face on the barroom ceiling.

One of the Bartenders had an interesting idea, one he had seen at another bar somewhere down the road.

The ceiling at The Bar was made of simple twelve inch tiles of pressed paper. His suggestion was to buy new tiles and give them to the customer’s to decorate and put the results on the ceiling, replacing the old ones as we went along..

This went over very well. For every ten tiles passed out we would get six back. The missing tiles usually consigned to closets and are probably still there waiting to be decorated. Some were quite spectacular. One was a four tile masterpiece of a Japanese style tiger.

One was another four tile creation reminiscent of the sixties psychedelic hippie artwork. Continue reading “From The Bar ~The Face On The Barroom Floor~”

My Paintings…an Array…

A friend, Troy Weidenheimer, and I had an email exchange and he, being a talented man, told me about his work primarily in oil paintings. He posted a link to his site and I saw and liked what I saw.
Which put me in mind of photo friends I knew who had created “albums” accessible to the public to share their wares so I looked around and found a trove of my watercolors I made during my Barney Steels days.

There was a Certain Painting I saw and was forced to look at due to its placement that so offended me I said “I can do better than that.” and commenced working on my dormant drawing skills.

To shorten the saga I will say I disliked the idea of oil painting because of its inherent odor and messiness and went for watercolor. It helped that this was Alberto Vargas’ medium too. I also focused strictly on women, using photographs in lieu of live models although I did pay one lass who had a perfect figure a modelling fee to come and stand naked in front of me while I looked closely at the Female Body Assembly which is a subtly elusive thing to catch on paper.

Continue reading “My Paintings…an Array…”

The Recording

After I retired from the workforce I became ill with COPD, a creeping, degenerative condition, that has a direct effect on one’s breathing process.

It is not curable but one can learn to live with it and maintain optimism.

I decided I wanted to put some of my musical “bon mots” on YouTube so after I board the “Freedom Train” people can perhaps share them and say, “Oh yeah…I remember him. He could play some and he sounded like this…”

So I put up a bunch of tunes.
I used a free recording program called Audacity that was easy to use and edit and commenced recording.

Polished CD quality they are not. They are more like what they used to call “demos”… one time through runs of a given song. But they served their purpose in that they show I was able to play guitar and Dobro as Chet Atkins would say, “slightly above below average.”

Continue reading “The Recording”