I can still remember sitting on the floor of my second grade classroom 27 years ago watching him. My Dad. The most amazing artist in all the world. He stood in front of my little 7 year old peers as a guest speaker whipping out in a few marker strokes whatever the kids called out. Clowns, horses, hot air balloons…whatever their imaginations could think of he would conjure on the big blank pad of paper. I remember my heart swelling with pride as I looked around at the amazement on the other kids faces. I was so lucky…my dad was a sort of magician. And I wanted to be just like him.
Back then Dad ran the art department of an aerospace company in Connecticut. He worked in an office, commuted back and forth on an overcrowded interstate highway every morning and every evening for what probably felt like a thousand years. He supported us, his family with this work. And I was so proud of being able to go to any encyclopedia and open it to find my dad’s art…the Space Shuttles and Space Telescopes in there are all his work. To me he was famous…one of the greats.
Growing up my world was full of stories of all the other artists in our family, many of whom had died before I ever got to know them or perhaps stayed in the “old country” in Italy. Painters, master carpenters, fashion designers, poets, musicians…this was our bloodline. We came from creative stock. But he was certain to tell me of the trials and tribulations these folks all faced as artists. It’s a hard path to follow…hard to make a living at it and even harder to support a family doing it.
He had bookshelves crammed with big fat art books to pour through and lose myself in on rainy days. I was surrounded by the works of amazing artists, from the Wyeths to Diego Rivera to Pablo Picasso to Jackson Pollack to Michelangelo to Monet, to name a few.
Lucky I had so much art around me to emulate because throughout my life I have been the lucky recipient of all of my Dad’s hand-me-down top-of-the line art supplies. Fancy guaches, watercolors, a huge set of markers with every color under the sun in it…colored pencils, tracing paper…you name it. I would use the stuff in my own way trying to mimic him and all of those other great artists I read about.
As the last of his three children prepared to go to college, something amazing happened to my Dad. He decided to dip his toe into a different pond in the art world. He bought himself a canvas and with great care after work in the evenings, he did something he hadn’t done in years and years and years…he made a painting. A painting that did not have to do with spaceships or aerospace technology.
It was a polar bear…an amazing, lifelike polar bear meandering through the terrain of a washy background that felt cold like a blizzard. I remember seeing it evolve and watching drop jawed as he magically made this great beast appear on the once white canvas. The big bear emanated strength and assuredness and the ability to survive the harsh elements…in retrospect, it kind of was like my Dad’s spirit painting of his inner-artist-animal, though I don’t think he’d ever describe it that way. To my poetic self, it signifies his readiness to leave the security of the paycheck a corporate job offers and brave the often times harsh world with his creativity and his pure talent as his guide.
He (lovingly) coerced my mom to pack up and hightail it to Maine, the place we as a family had enjoyed on many a summer vacation. He wanted to paint. He wanted to live more simply. He went from dipping his toe into those waters to diving head first in with no looking back. And thankfully, I think he would say with no regrets, either.
Today, my Dad, Pat DeSantis, is a successful artist. He works in a studio and has his own gallery in the gorgeous carriage house attached to the home he and my Mom, Margaret, share. The P. DeSantis Studio and Gallery is located at 77 North Street in Kennebunkport…across from Patten’s Berry Farm. The chair at his big desk where he paints looks out over a beautiful yard into the Maine woods, a lot different than that office chair he used to sit in at work. His first of many paintings, that magical, mystical Polar Bear, is hung with a certain sublime pride over the mantel above the fireplace in my Dad’s gallery today. I think that bear feels more at home surrounded by the woods and the elements…and so does my father.
Today he makes his own art for a living and not surprising to anyone hearing our story, so do I. It strikes me as poignant, when I think back to my days in college, when after making an attempt to be a writer I switched my degree to art and my Dad responded with sunken shoulders and a big frown. He tried to convince me that having a trade, a more marketable skill would be much more sensible. He tried to dissuade me with talks of the reality of the starving artist. And I sat and I politely listened, but then turned around and did what he had been inspiring me to do my whole entire life…I flexed my creativity, just like he had and I became an artist. And art permeates everything I do.
And so I would like to say, to my Dad, “Thanks.” Thanks for believing in the importance of art. Thanks for being so brave and making the jump into your real self…the painter, and continuing to let that painter evolve showing me that there is no need for stagnancy in life. Thanks for realizing that I am as bullheaded as you and that you couldn’t stop me, and thus encouraging me and cheering me through my personal trials as an artist. And thank you, Dad, for inspiring me.
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