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

People often ask me if it’s difficult for me to let go of my paintings when they sell. I tell them it’s harder when they stay around the house and don’t sell! My paintings are like my fingerprints that I am leaving on the world. They may be around for a long time after I am gone. That’s a pretty cool thought!

After my grandfather died, my aunt gave me some of his books, one of his paintings and a box of his paintbrushes. They went missing several years ago (other than the painting). The other day, I went into the local budget shop, and pulled a book of landscape painting off the shelf. Opening the front cover, I saw the name Alfred A. Young inscribed. My first thought was “how odd that somebody has the same name as my grandfather.” Then I realized, this is one of his books that had been missing.

It has taken me a couple of days to get over the hurt of not having those books returned to me. Now I choose to treasure the book as a reminder of my grandfather, and am happy for his fingerprint in the form of the book and the return of one thing that had been his.