By Troy Headrick
Last weekend, I was able to spend some time with my father. My wife and I drove up to Georgetown, Texas, the town where he and my stepmother live. We arrived on Saturday evening and stayed with them until Monday afternoon.
I have written about my dad elsewhere in this blog. He is my inspiration in more ways than one. He’s aging very gracefully and philosophically despite his health challenges. Plus, I’ve long seen him as a creative genius. He did not finish his university studies but majored in the fine arts, in painting to be more precise. He is also an accomplished sculptor and songwriter. In fact, he has done musical collaborations with a handful of famous lyricists who live in Nashville. On top of all that, dad has been a successful house flipper and made good money buying and developing tracts of land. I don’t think it would be an exaggeration to call him a “dreamy visionary.”
We always spend time in his art studio/man cave, and this visit was no exception. While sitting among his many abstract wood carvings, I asked him about art and what got him started. Did he have in training? He told me that he didn’t, not before attending university. He explained that drawing and painting was always something that came easy for him. I pushed him a little bit to elaborate. He thought for a minute and told me that he didn’t pursue it as much as he probably should have because it was a skill that was always there and thus he took if for granted.
That sounded so familiar. I guess I was born with artistic talent. When I was a child, my teachers, starting in about the first grade, recognized this and sent notes home to my parents, exhorting them to have me take private art lessons. As a result, I did a year of private study with Zakaria Ali, a gifted painting student at the local university. Zak, originally hailing from Malaysia, ended up becoming a famous artist in his home country and a renowned poet.
I’m writing all this because I want to share a link with the art website I’m putting together. There was a time in the past when I showed and sold art. In fact, one of the pieces I did during a very active period can be found as the header image for this blog.
My goal is to pursue art again and to be serious about it. I literally have thousands of pieces, the vast majority of which haven’t been photographed or scanned. So, if you like what you see here, come back often as I expect this gallery to grow over time. Plus, in the near future, I’m going put prices on all these pieces.
I’m attracted more and more to abstract art as I get older. Actually, I was always into doing “funny” or “weird” art. When I was a child, many of my family members wanted me to make “pretty” pictures. I think they had very traditional paintings of flowers and landscapes in mind. I was never attracted by the idea of drawing and painting such things. I think I probably scared my family because I drew strange faces and such when I was a mere wee thing.
I strongly believe that art must be fun. (Many artists take themselves and their work deadly seriously.) It should be fun for the maker and fun for the viewer. I love colors. I love line, shape, color, and composition. I love working fast and losing control (a little bit). I love being very self-expressive and try to work fast so that my mind doesn’t interfere too much. I don’t necessarily want people to “understand” my work; I’d rather they have an immediate emotional reaction to it.
Thanks for reading and looking.
Troy Headrick’s personal blog can be found here.