Beaux Arts - The Mona Lisa of Dogs of Playing Poker

The experiential test of whether this art is great or good, or minor or abysmal is the effect it has on your own sense of the world and of yourself. Great art changes you. -Sister Wendy Beckett

Every artist dips his brush in his own soul, and paints his own nature into his pictures. ~Henry Ward Beecher

The aim of every artist is to arrest motion, which is life, by artificial means and hold it fixed so that a hundred years later, when a stranger looks at it, it moves again since it is life. ~William Faulkner


Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once we grow up. ~Pablo Picasso

I have stood in the galleries of emerging artists, the corridors of the heady Museum of Contemporary Art, at the bar of Gallery Cabaret, whose walls adorn the creative genius of local bohemians and sat before the majestic oils of Tintoretto, Cimabue, Giotto, Rembrandt, Monet and Renoir at the Art Institute of Chicago and intoxicated my soul and manly fibers with Man's attempt to arrest God's handiwork.

My late wife Mary Cleary Hickey (1957-1998) dabbled in oils and had mastered coals and water colors and taught hundreds of teenagers to practice human expression at Bishop McNamara, LeMans Academy, and Bishop Noll Institute. She drank pitchers of beer with Ed Paschke, Jim Dine, and local Kankakee, Chicago and Indiana artists. Mary was Bauhaus.

Me? I can appreciate art, but I know what I like and that is Dogs Playing Pool, Poker, Three Card Monte and anything else.

As far as the two and three dimensional visual arts go, this Jasper's eyebrows meet his fore-lock.

I have found the Mona Lisa of my Genre! Dan McManis is my Leonardo! Here is the masterpiece! Voila!




McManis' delicate application of light . . . I am spechless! The kinetic energy captured in a moment unites, once again, the finger tip of God and Man!

I am overwhelmed. I'm gonna fix me a plate full of hash and eggs!