Muhammad Ali - The Greatest

Thanks for your comments on my portraits. Always fun to do and they are extremely popular with collectors.

I love this portrait of Muhammad Ali. I'm going to be able to upgrade my years of portrait illustrations to "art' quality because of you. I find your work very liberating. Why am I still stuck in Impressionism? That's what FAA is all about, learning from one another. Sure sales are what keep us going. Sales that I made were all from my jazz collection. During that period when I sketched for three years in a jazz club in Santa Barbara, I elevated my colors and compositions. The owner of the Club, Ridah Omri from Tunisia stole 5 of my greatest works. Here's how the three years went: me sitting sketching with pastels on 8x10 precut pastel paper in a homemade masonitenportfolio which served as a backing. In three years I made hundreds of drawings, all signed by the artists at 2 am after a great evening of music. I'm putting some up on Instagram now. They are more imaginative, due to the presence of the music. There were hardly any other customers. See, this was and is a white skin town. So no audiences paying. The other jazz lounge was on State Street, the main street. It was boring to me to go there. Well, I didn't know how to do business. If I had, I wouldn't have let him steal 5 of my best pieces that he had thrown up on his second level top of the storefront. I trusted him, and never thought that the reason these framed pieces were up there were because he was stealing them. I could easily have taken them down the day I discovered them in his possession. At the end he told me not to come over because 'he was moving a piano" on closing day. I believed him. When I went there everything was gone. He had put all my 8x10's in his storage. Ray of luck, my tall belligerent son walked into town from S.F. and helped the situation without a fist fight. Ridah brought all my work to his house. In my blind unawareness, I didn't even notice that the 4 best works were not there. Stolen again, I went home without them. I called San Francisco CALA, California Lawyers for the arts. They mediated with me and Ridah. I was overwhelmed again by the professional voice, and still I did not demand my pieces back. Ridah argued that I was listening to music "for free" for three years, and didn't "pay" for my actual three free glasses of wine over a period of three years. What a wimp I am.