Painting pictures of life

To spur his creative process, Malverne artist Arthur Raymond will hold one of his semi-completed watercolors up to a mirror and examine it in reverse. “I have no idea why that works,” he said, “but it makes me look at the painting again and wonder why I did this or that.”

Looking at life in reverse, however, doesn’t seem to be the modus operandi for Raymond, who, at 92, recently finished a week in which he played 18 holes of golf, celebrated his birthday, and won an award for his painting “September Storm” at the Art League of Nassau County’s fall art exhibit.

“I had no idea what I was going to paint,” he said of the work. “I started making little two-inch squares for no reason at all. Then I drew a line on top of them and said, ‘It looks like two sheets hanging from a clothesline.’ Then I decided to make a storm forming in the distance, and the sheets blowing high on this hill. I put a house there, and then a woman rushing to get those clothes off the line and looking back at the storm.”

Two weeks ago, the painting received the Art League of Nassau County’s Blue Ribbon Special Award.

Winning awards for his artwork is nothing new for Raymond, although he takes great pride in every one of the 58 awards he has received from such organizations as the American Artists Professional League and the Village Art Club of Rockville Centre. In his Malverne home hang a lifetime’s worth of paintings, the product of his observations of places, people and beauty that have captured his imagination.

“This painting here is of Fred,” he said, pointed to a striking watercolor of an old man outside the door of a rickety dwelling surrounded by chickens. “Fred lived right near the end of the West Hempstead High School parking lot. He owned all the property surrounding the high school. Fred looked like a pauper, but he was probably worth many bucks.”