214th day sober. I tried some trumpet practice last night and it went awful. I tried "Wedge" breathing and without, and it took a huge amount of effort to get the smallest peep out of the horn above C or E in the staff. To balance things out, I did a couple cards' worth of doodles too.
I woke up with a headache, and I'm beginning to wonder if trumpet playing is consistent with these headaches I get now.
For some reason, I remembered that "Dennis", the older Australian guy who gave me paints and brushes and lent me art books and so on, spelled his name with one N. I was able to look him up easily. After getting "burned out" he went back to Australia in disgust, and it appears he continued his career, finally leaving this vale of tears in 2007.
He'd retired from the Australian Navy so, like myself holding out for Social Security, he had a basic living taken care of. Some of his paintings can be found online although what I've been able to find don't begin to do him justice. He was doing amazing stuff when we knew him in the late 70s, and he was still not yet 40 years old although he seemed awfully mature and grizzled to me at the time.
To get 20 years in with the Australian Navy, he'd have had to join at age 18 or maybe a bit earlier like 17, and since he was born in 1940 that would have him joining in 1957 or 1958. Let's say he'd joined in 1957, got his 20 years in, that has him retiring from it in 1977 which is probably just about right because when we met him, it seems he'd just started to be a full time artist, and the "inventory" of paintings he had on hand clearly showed his progress.
He'd started painting some amazing stuff, taking inspiration from the great seascape painters and good teachers of technique like E. John Robinson. He also did amazing landscapes and I had a wonderful one of Sacred Falls hanging over my "art work table" in my bedroom in Hau'ula. He said smoking pot helped him concentrated, "It's the weed, I tell you, it's the weed!".
His art may have actually gone downhill being back in Australia and less able to get "the weed". That might explain the paintings I'm able to find online, done when he was back in Australia years after I knew him, being uninspiring. It's too bad he wasn't able to stay in Hawaii - he could have been the successor to Herb Kawainui Kane, except of course for the problems he'd run into for being white.
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