Mt Adams Art Walk Sat May 12 Noon to 6 pm

The Rookwood: Music 4 pm, 5 artists

I will be painting at The Rookwood on Mt. Adams and displaying along with four other artists – Glenda Suttman, Mark Cummings, Jeff Johns, and Christian Dallas. This second Saturday afternoon activity began last month on April 14 and there will be another one next month on June 9. If you don’t have anything better to do, please come down and enjoy!

When I first moved to Cincinnati from Minneapolis, there used to be a big “Pub Crawl” every spring, I think to benefit the Opera. We rode school buses after work and went all over the city to restaurants and clubs and it was so much fun! So I’m glad to see this tradition being revived on Mt. Adams, where all 18 establishments are within walking distance of one another. And with the added attraction of over 100 visual artists and musicians in every location: it promises to be a great time!

Rookwood (formerly the Pottery) holds a lot of memories for me too. My first dinner at this restaurant was as an Indiana college student visiting my best friend at Miami U. We went on a double date and mine was a fix up nicknamed “Sir Walter” for his lovely manners. The guys took us to Rookwood Pottery for dinner and we danced inside one of the kilns! I still remember looking up at the restaurant from the bottom of the hill and being really impressed by it and its history.

I ate dinner at Rookwood on my first night as a Cincinnati resident: I walked there having rented an apartment in a house with a fabulous view on Carney Street. The first home portraits I ever purchased were two Paul Joerling drawings of that house: one done before renovation and one after. I still have those in my home today because I love Mount Adams and always will.

My next Rookwood memory is of the last group lunch my art teacher Elmer Ruff hosted for his students there. I still paint with him and some of the people I met for the first time at that lunch. Isn’t it nice that a place so memorable from when I first started painting again is now the location where my work will be displayed on the Art Walk this weekend? I look at it as a pat on the back from the universe!

More recently, we’ve come to Rookwood after Final Fridays – on a cold winter night with my brother and his family, reminiscing about the kilns we once danced in. And last September, out on the deck on a warm night enjoying the fireworks from a Reds game while eating great food amidst a lively crowd at the bar.

Those who know me well understand that I’m a fair-weather painter – I don’t exhibit or paint outdoors when high winds, cold temperatures, rain or snow are involved. Two of my favorite ceramicists did their first outdoor tent show in the parking lot between Rookwood and Celestial on the windiest Derby Day ever and so many of their friends’ work and displays were damaged that they’re fair-weather now too. Glenda Suttman is one of them and she’ll be inside at Rookwood – look for me there too if the weather doesn’t cooperate on Saturday afternoon.