I had done a little art in high school, mostly charcoal drawings and just on my own. The school principal wouldn’t let me take art class because, he said, I rarely went to class and was a troublemaker. I was one of co-captains of the winning football team though, so he wouldn’t throw me out.

 It wasn’t until I had to spend some time in the hospital in my mid-thirties getting an experimental chemotherapy for non-Hodgkin’s Lymphoma that I focused on art. I chose watercolors because they are one of the least toxic of mediums. Two books – Painting People in Watercolor by Alex Powers and Cowboys & Images by William Matthews — inspired my early efforts. I tried to replicate the watercolors in those books over and over until I got the hang of it. Some of those paintings I started a couple of hundred times.

Matthews work is realistic, but Powers work continues to inspire me as I evolve toward more impressionistic painting. Powers’ work is rough, sketch like, searching for the essence of the object. He ignores elements that don’t interest him.

Below are some of my favorites of his work, starting with his earlier paintings and ending with those he did toward the end of his life. I don’t know, and was unfortunately unable to find, the titles of some.

Though not widely recognized or appreciated — he focused on teaching and Watercolor Society shows rather than promoting his own work — to my mind he was a great American artist. I took a painting workshop that he held — the only workshop I’ve ever taken — and told him that his work had had a major influence on mine. He couldn’t see the similarity. There isn’t much similarity, I agree, other than that search for the essence.