The Thrower Art Gallery

A lot of people don't know that I am an amateur artist, and over the years I have kept some of what I feel are my best work and have decided to do a virtual gallery of them here for your edification.   These go back almost 30 years, as the oldest picture I have is courtesy of one of my former junior high teachers, Mr. Thomas Engleman, who seeing my creation of it back in 1985 offered me a quarter for it.  In 1997, about 12 years later, he sent the picture back to me telling me that it was, to quote "the best quarter he ever invested."  And, that is the picture I will start with here.

The picture is of a big dance band, as at the time I was really beginning to get into that music and was collecting it on LP records.  So, one of the best ways I could express my enthusiasm was to draw it.   There were originally two of these that Mr. Engleman bought from me, and the other one he sent to Henry Boggen, the disc jockey I listened to on Sunday nights on WBT-AM in Charlotte, NC.   Although Henry has since passed away, I always wondered if he still had that picture.

This next picture above I actually won an award in a local high school art contest back in 1987, and it was entitled "Meeting of Concert Violinist and Jazz Orchestra."  I won an Honorable Mention for the artwork, but was also the only person from my high school to win.  

The above picture was created sometime around 1989-1990, during my first year of college when I felt a strong call to the ministry.  This was one representation of the church I wanted to build, but unfortunately my depth perception was a bit off, as you can see by the crooked spire in the center.  Over the next few years, I would create several of the following pictures of this church along the same theme.  Some are more elaborate than others, as on some I omitted windows purposely. 

The story behind the church pictures was a simple one really.  At the time, I was somewhere between being a Southern Baptist (which I would later formally leave in 1989) and a Pentecostal, but I had a vision for a different type of Pentecostal church - it would be a liturgical church!  I could envision the music, the interior, and even the chiming of the carillon in my imagination, and was even convinced that God wanted me to build this.  In a sense, though, I guess I did, but it was in these drawings instead.

   

This picture also dates from around 1989, and is my attempt to fuse a liturgical church with the classic large Pentecostal church as I perceived them in those days.  

The final design I settled on looked like this, and every drawing thereafter would feature a similar design to this, with the twin bell towers and elaborate winding front staircase.  The domes were inspired by my fascination with Eastern Orthodoxy, which I had started to develop at around the time.

As the 1990's progressed, my designs took on more elaboration, if not in detail then in form.  What follows are some similar pictures.

Lest anyone would be denied a shot of the inside of the said church, I also spent some time on detailing that, as the drawing below shows:

A lot of things inspired the above drawing.  At that time, I loved, for instance, watching Dr. D. James Kennedy's Coral Ridge Presbyterian Church in Fort Lauderdale, which is where the pulpit design and the organ came from.  The Eastern Orthodox dome motif also came into play, as well as a central Eucharistic table.  However, staying true to the church being a "legitimate" Foursquare Gospel congregation (the Pentecostal denomination I was part of then), I also had a large choir loft, prayer rails, and overhead screens, not to mention the huge baptistry in the center with the archway.   I was determined to "do church differently" while remaining faithfully Foursquare, and this was what that vision produced.  

However, I didn't just draw churches, but also loved village scenes.  Two in particular were the small towns of my childhood in West Virginia, and the "Cracker towns" of rural Florida, which also enchanted me.   The drawings below represent those.  The church in some of these drawings is particularly disproportionate, as it was usually the first thing I drew.

A mountain village, representing my roots.  This was a later drawing, as I created this sometime around 1999 or 2000.  

An earlier and smaller village, probably created I would say sometime around 1997. 

I have an interesting story behind the above picture.  I had a dream back in 1995 that I visited a small parish church that looked a lot like this, and I wanted to do as much detail of it as I could remember.  The church was like a small Catholic church, but inside the people were praying over the sick and uttering words of prophecy.  The priest, in particular, had a prophetic calling.  The building in the dream was located on the upper slope of a hill street, and although you could not access the front for some weird reason in the dream, I made provision for a staircase in this drawing as you can see.  

This was my interpretation of a Lebanese coastal village, with the majestic tower of a Maronite parish church in front with a priest praying over the town.   These took some work, as drawing towns from a distance required some strategically-placed angular lines.   But, for some reason, it worked!

My rendition of a Florida Cracker homestead.  I love "Cracker Culture" in Florida, and there is an enchantment about those little towns and villages off the beaten path and away from the congestion of the cities.   It is, to me, a lost attribute of Florida that needs to be recovered.

Another of my older pictures depicting my rendition of a Cracker village on a bayou.  Note the old-time Holiness church on stilts to the left.  Again, church drawings often were the first components I worked on with these types of pictures.

Another mountain village picture.  The huge church-like building in the center dominating the picture is a campmeeting tabernacle.  This was created as I was reminiscing one day about the old campmeetings we used to have back in the day when I was much younger.

This drawing is my representation of an Armenian mountain town in the shadow of Mt. Ararat.  The little bearded man in the foreground is a priest.

By 1998 I had gotten somewhat away from church drawings, although on occasion I did sketch some things.  The one below was a sketch I made on a piece of memo paper at work one day of a closeup of the exterior of that dream church I once envisioned. 

By 2000, I was back to drawing orchestras again, and one thing I love to do is to draw the empty bandstand with representations of where all the instruments would be found.  Like the church, in my early years, I dreamed of being the next Paul Whiteman or Freddy Martin, and often wondered what it would be like fronting a 35-piece orchestra.

Finally, I finish up with one of my most recent landscape drawings:

One of the last pictures of my "dream church" I composed sometime around the year 2000 or so.

I hope this will give you a general idea of my artwork, and although it is not the best way of viewing them (I made snapshots of these for the purpose of this virtual gallery), perhaps it will give you an idea of my artistic style.  I don't claim to be a Picasso or anything like that, and these pictures will probably never hang in the Louvre, but they are a part of me.  And with that, I want to close by including a humorous caricature of one of my former supervisors I made a couple of years ago:

Again, hope you enjoy, and will see you next time.