My favorite holidays are

1) My birthday. Not only is it my own personal holiday, but it falls in the heart of summer when I can ride my bike, have a bonfire and just be out in my yard.

2) National Space Exploration Day. It wasn’t a holiday until my 9th birthday when Neil Armstrong walked on the surface of the moon.

3) Lake Superior Day, when my birthday falls on a Sunday.

My grandfather was a painter and art teacher. I’m sad I didn’t know him better or have him around longer. He was an eccentric man. I have few memories of him, but I do have one of his paintings, and the book he taught from. The book is all marked up with his insights and underlining, and there are a few of his notes tucked between the pages, along with a flier for one of his classes. I read that book with his annotations, and I feel like he is speaking to me.

My father is also an eccentric man, and the older I get, the more I realize I am a lot like him. And I’m happy about that. For a brief time, my father painted. He created tiny abstracts on wood blocks, and I have those in a box. I treasure them. He shrugs them off as though they are nothing, but I once heard him talking about them with his grandchildren, and it might as well have been an inspiring gallery talk. A fireside chat.

Then there’s me. I think people would say I’m a bit eccentric myself. I don’t know about that. I’m currently studying comics through the California College of the Arts, having studied art and painted throughout my life.I recently realized that my paintings are comics, and that we are surrounded by comics all the time, and I hadn’t recognized them.

A: This is going to sound like I’m making a joke, but I’m not. My favorite thing to paint is paintings. Seriously. I’m most known at this point for painting old growth white pines, but it’s not white pines, it’s paint on a surface that conjures up an image of white pines in your mind. So, the more a painting looks like an object or representational form like a landscape, a still life, a portrait… the more it looks like something other than a painting, the more of a lie it is. So I like a painting to look like a painting, and even when you look at my paintings of white pines, or animals or fish, there’s always a twist to it. You see the brush strokes, you see the paint, you see that I scratch into it with the opposite end of the paintbrush. These are all things that say, alright, you see a fish, but it’s a painting.

Sivertson will be representing more of my work with prints on canvas and paper.

I’m working on a new show for Coho. It’s going up March 31 and coming down May 31 2016.

One of my paintings is being featured in a television commercial! Shooting began this morning. I will update you as the project progresses.

I was really moved by your fish paintings! I like how, over time, the fish paintings have become more abstract. Not necessarily the painting techniques, but the ideas they represent. The earlier ones have a serene, peaceful feeling and the more recent ones seem more dreamlike with a subconscious quality that I find very interesting. The fish in trees paintings made me smile, just as if I had dreamed of fish in trees and had awakened with a smile at the thought of dreaming of such a thing.

Scott, Durham SC