My first commission painting was requested of me when I was a junior in high school in 1966. It was a major work of art done in soft pastels depicting the great pipe organ at Valpariso University. Oddly, I was asked to do this very large piece from a tiny black & white photograph. I was too naïve to say I couldn’t do it, so I did it!”

Another work I was asked to do as a teenager was an oil painting of an image from a restaurant menu.

A commissioned oil painting of which I am extremely proud was executed on a full Deerskin hide - complete with the bullet hole seen in the upper right. When Chris DuPont opened the Crazy Horse Saloon in Ketchum, Idaho in 1972 he asked me to paint a portrait of Crazy Horse. Unfortunately there are no photographs of Crazy Horse.

All the elements I put into the painting came from reading about the great man in four books I  read for research before doing the painting. He is shown with brown hair, highlighted by the sun, as he was described to have, rather than black hair.

Can you see the teepee village down below by the river? It's rather small in the photo and might just look like trees. Crazy Horse used to go to hills to meditate, rather than holing up in his dwelling while deliberating how to lead his people. He had his famous vision up in the hills also. That's why I depicted the great warrior in this way. All of the other elements are sacred items he was known to have carried with him.

After doing all the reading on Crazy Horse, I had a pretty spiritual experience performing the actual painting. It just seemed to flow out my fingers. I did it mostly non-stop in a few days, only stopping to sleep and eat a bit. It was very exhilarating and exhausting both; and satisfying too.

This commissioned pastel painting was inspired from words in a Cat Stevens song 'Boy With The Moon & Star On His Head'. 

In 1974, while living in a teepee in the wilds up Titus Cr. near Galena Lodge in the Wood River Valley, 22 miles north of Sun Valley Idaho, I painted this oil painting of the lodge. The location was once a mining town, but all that remained were a few small cabins and the lodge. It was a travelers way-stop at the base of Galena Summit. I was doing painting commissions, plus leather and jewelry work for sale at that time. Galena Lodge has now become a thriving destination day-lodge for mountain bikers, hikers and especially, cross-country skiers.

One of the most unusual commissions I ever did was an ink-on-paper caricature portrait of  the Base Saxophone player of the San Francisco band ‘The Exchange'. They used to play Sun Valley and his band leader asked me to do this piece as a surprise birthday present. The Base Sax player was very tall and was magnificent when he played his enormous base saxophone, so I showed him to be magically elevating off the ground! -  G.P.L.