People Who Have Changed My Life: My Dad

 This is the second in a series of posts about people who have changed my life. The painting on the left is an oil sketch my dad, Charles F. Keck, did of me when I was a little girl. He was a graduate student at UCLA. He also taught part-time  at an art school in Hollywood.
I guess we didn't have much money, but I never thought about that. Thanks to my parents' ingenuity, we had everything we needed.
Every weekend, we went "sketching" with a friend of my dad's from Chouinard Art Institute, Marjorie Matthews.
She had been left unable to walk by polio, so she sat in the front seat of her Chevy
to paint. Dad took a stool and easel to the side of the road. Poor Mom was in the back seat with me, and I was probably a stinker, but those days were a treasure for  me. They had so much fun capturing the fleeting beauty of the Southern California landscape in the early 1950s. It was still very rural. The small landscape below is an example of one of Dad's plein air works.
I also enjoyed being a mouse in the corner at gallery shows in Laguna and in the living room of our apartment when my parents' interesting friends came to visit.
Thanks to those early days, I have always thought that art was the very best calling.