The Loomis Mermaid

THE LOOMIS MERMAID - Acrylic painting on a 16 x 20 size canvas board.

In 1965, when I decided to learn how to draw and paint, I went to the one bookstore in Middlebury, Vermont, where I lived at the time, and was lucky to find five art instruction books by Andrew Loomis, one of the great golden age illustrators. I bought them all; "Fun With a Pencil," "Drawing the Head & Hands," "Figure Drawing For All It's Worth," "Three Dimensional Drawing," and "Creative Illustration".

I started with "Fun with a Pencil," reading and doing all the drawing exercises in the book, and over the next two years, during spare time I read all five books, made hundreds of drawings, and finished with the painting projects in "Creative Illustration". This painting is my copy of the "Mermaid" painting in that book, but I made lots of changes so it's not an exact copy.

So, while I am often described as a "self-taught" artist, obviously that is not true, my teacher was Andrew Loomis. But the learning never stops and over the following years I learned a lot more from many other artists.