Model Airplanes

Rob Rez’s corner inside Bound by Glory Tattoo is decorated with deer skulls, a bandolier stuffed with bullets and rows of tattoo designs detailed in lush colors. His World War II-style model airplanes hang from the ceiling, and bottles of rubbing alcohol line a bookshelf full of National Geographic magazines dating back to the 1950s. “They’re great reference material,” Rez says of the magazines. Like any longtime tattoo artist, he has a thick portfolio of commissioned work—pages of skulls, birds and pinup girls rendered in black and white or color. He loves tattooing, he says, but at night, after a full day of crafting images from other people’s imaginations, he likes to pull out his paints and let his own ideas pour onto the canvas.

“Tattooing is so rigid and pre-planned,” Rez says. “It has a structured outline and then you fill in your colors precisely. When I do these paintings, these are more like sketches on canvas. It’s not really the best phrase in the world but I call them ‘slappers’ because I’m just slapping the paint down in a fun way. I just let go and do it.”

Rez has worked as an artist in multiple capacities for several decades, but it’s only been in the last two years that he started regularly making paintings. He began with geometric designs—Cubism-style pieces that play with color and abstracted subjects. After that he moved on to more figurative images of flora and fauna: insects, crocodiles, flowers and snakes. He did a whole

Article source: http://missoulanews.bigskypress.com/missoula/tattoo-artist-rob-rez-adds-a-paint-brush-to-his-arsenal/Content?oid=3370363

James Eaton of Oakmont began driving at the tender age of 10, and hasn’t slowed down since.

“Ohio didn’t require driver’s licenses back then,” says Eaton, 99. “Wheels and motors was what I liked.”

Born in 1917 in United, Pa., Eaton will turn 100 on Feb. 3, 2017.

Turning his passion for cars and planes into a livelihood, Eaton owned and operated Eaton Motors on Allegheny Boulevard in Oakmont for more than 50 years, and worked locally as an airplane inspector.

Eaton, a fixture in Oakmont, lives independently, still driving around almost daily in his white Cadillac.

He is quite domestic ­— doing his own laundry, cooking for himself and keeping up his social obligations that include memberships with the Freemasons, Shriners and the Horseless Carriage Club of America.

This soon to be centenarian says he feels “about 65.” Eaton still serves as chairman of the annual Oakmont Antique Car Show, held on Father’s Day each year.

He speaks with a strong voice, and has a sharp mind along with excellent hearing. Eaton says his doctor advised him to only come in annually, as he is physically sound.

“It’s been a good life, and I did most of the things I wanted to do,” he says. “Most people retire and just sit around not doing anything. Not me.”

Planes, trains

Article source: http://triblive.com/lifestyles/morelifestyles/11816377-74/eaton-oakmont-says

Teresa Steinbach-Garcia combines her background in watercolors and experimentation with mixed-media to capture the nuances of the world around her on canvas.

The Wilton artist’s paintings of men and women are creative depictions of the stories of her subjects, and her countryside paintings bring you right into the serenity they portray.

The artist is well-known in the Sacramento region, having participated and won awards at many different exhibits; most recently, the Watercolor West International, the Crocker Kingsley, and the California Art-Club Beauty of the Seasons at the Pence Gallery.

Garcia will be the featured artist at the Elk Grove Fine Arts Center’s First Saturday Art Reception on Feb. 4, 4-7 p.m.

 “In the area that I live in, I don’t feel like I have to go to France or somewhere like that to find inspiration for my paintings. I get all my inspiration right here,” she said.  

Garcia’s paintings of men, young and old, capture them doing everyday things such as walking through lonesome roads, reading on a bench, and flying model airplanes.

The paintings capture the emotions and the aura of her subjects in their most contented zones.

In fact, Garcia chose her father as the subject of one of her gentlemen’s paintings.

Inspired by his liveliness and positive nature, the piece depicts her father – a man whom she says is rarely at rest – in a more subdued mood.

“I started doing a series of gentlemen’s paintings just because they fascinate me,” she said. “Their wariness of life, their vitality…when I’m out and about I

Article source: http://www.egcitizen.com/lifestyle/artist-showcase-teresa-steinbach-garcia/article_6680bc16-e807-11e6-820a-abb6f0a6f58f.html

Pat Smith checks in with Jethro William Meek as part of the Daily News Where Are They Now? features.

Jethro William Meek shares these accounts. Shortly before the end of WWII, I was born on April 19, 1945, in Washington, D.C., where my father, Jethro A. Meek, from Greensburg, was stationed in the army. My mother, Anne (Birdwell) Meek, grew up Nacogdoches, Texas, where her father, Dr. A.W. Birdwell, had founded Stephen F. Austin State Teachers’ College, now Stephen F. Austin State University.

My parents had met before the war at the University of Texas, where both were instructors in the English Department. Needless to say, my sister, Eugenia (born in Greensburg in 1948), and I were drilled incessantly on English grammar, punctuation, and literature in our youth. Tedious and boring as this was, I guess it formed the basis for my later appreciation of language, both English and German.

My youth through high school was spent in Greensburg. For me, it was a trying time – always trying to keep up the façade of a happy, normal family. In fact, life inside the big gray stone house next door to the Presbyterian church was not all that great, in 14 rooms filled with antique furniture dominated by my difficult father. Against his wishes, he was compelled by his own mother to return home after the war and run the family farms. His PhD dissertation on English literature remained unfinished.

My father viewed himself larger than life, sort of an unrecognized Oscar Wilde misplaced

Article source: http://www.greensburgdailynews.com/news/local_news/where-are-they-now/article_347cfd45-fd3f-546b-8e5c-71ce09475e1e.html

Virginia McCall got a telephone call she would never forget on her 19th birthday — Feb. 8, 1944.

On the other end of the line she heard her brother’s voice.

She hadn’t talked to him since before his plane from Tunisia to Italy crash-landed in Albania in a storm on Nov. 8, 1943. He and the other 29 nurses and medics on the plane spent three months making their way through Nazi-controlled Albania.

At one point McCall and her family thought her brother was dead.

After the crash, she spent lunch breaks from her job at the telephone company in Indianola at a barber shop on the south side of The Square, where she listened to the news, hoping for news about her brother.

One day the radio announcer said Hayes’ plane had crashed in the Mediterranean Sea and everyone aboard had perished.

But that wasn’t true. Eventually all 30 members of the Army Air Force’s 807th Medical Air Evacuation Transport Squadron were rescued.

Harold Hayes was the last living member of the squadron. He passed away Sunday, Jan. 22, 2017, in Oregon, following

Article source: http://www.desmoinesregister.com/story/news/local/indianola/2017/01/30/last-survivor/97257868/