Carl Gethmann's Gallery

I would classify myself as a beginning artist trying to become a professional.  My interest in art began about four decades ago mostly because my wife was taking a lot of courses in art history.  Since I was going to a lot of museums with her, I began to take an interest and got hooked.  As it developed, I was most attracted to landscapes. During the late 60s and early 70s, I learned to paint and draw using exercises in how-to books and copying paintings and drawings from art books. However, for many reasons -too many to go into here - I dropped my painting efforts and switched over to a self-directed 30-year study of art history.  My study was done exclusively by observing art in museums, online, and in art books. I concentrated on coloring, structure, and eye leading.  My full-time job was a computer hardware/software technical writer and wrote many online help systems for major companies.  I retired from technical writing in 2005.  About four years ago, I decided to try, one again, my hand at art and bought a number of graphics and paint programs to build on my knowledge of computers and software.  I have no formal art training whatsoever, but do have a long history of teaching myself whatever I wanted to learn.  After I finished a number of paintings, I set up my own website www.cgeth.com to showcase my work for my friends.  After receiving a favorable response from them, I decided to see if I could generate an art career.  My principal aim is to show that computers and graphics programs can be used to produce traditional fine art and not just fantasy/manga/science fiction art that you see in all the computer art and design magazines.  My favorite painters are JMW Truner, George Inness, Walter Launt Palmer, William Merritt Chase, and  Claude Lorrain. My favorite schools of art are the Hudson River School; American Tonalists and the Eastern and Californian impressionists; the French Barbizon School; English landscapists; and the Dutch land/seascapists of the Ruisdael era.  I would classify my work as contemporary realism/representational with an flair for being a colorist.  I'd be interested in hearing from anyone who has similar interests.