Welcome

My dad loved to garden in the Spring and Summer and oil paint all Autumn and Winter. I was a child when he first started the painting part. I faintly remember Bob Ross on the TV and “How To Oil Paint” booklets lying around. I remember the smell of Linseed Oil and wet oil paint. I remember coming home from college for the Holidays only to find my bedroom stacked with oil paintings and no place to sleep. It wasn’t until my parents moved into my deceased grandparents little house (with the million dollar view of Vermont and New Hampshire off Bigelow Road and NYS Route 9N) that the gardening part kicked in. He started with vegetables. Corn, potatoes, English peas, squash, string beans and tomatoes. And then bulb flowers. And then even more bulb flowers. Until the entire acre was completely covered in color. It was a beautiful sight to behold. “The stern but healthful climate” of the Adirondacks, as Burton Bernstein writes in “The Sticks”, his book about rural Essex County, New York, drove my dad inside in the colder months. And there he painted. Almost 1,500 paintings in all. The memorial site, http://www.gbigelow.com, exhibits a small percentage of his prolific output.