LIVERPOOL — It was a small painting kit, Michael Grad recalls, with tiny tubes of paint, a less-than-stellar brush and little canvas boards.

It made him happy, having that gift request filled when he was 12 years old.

Grad smiles while recalling that story in the lobby of the Liverpool Public Library, where he’s just about finished with the morning task of hanging up nine of his paintings on two of the walls.
His work will hang for an Art in the Lobby exhibit through the month of April.

After receiving that kit, Grad says, he’s been painting most of his 62 years of life. He’s lived in Liverpool most of them, too. So this exhibit is a good fit.

He doesn’t have a title for it, nor can he quite exactly label the style of the colorful work that adorns the walls.

Grad does know that they come from his latest decade of work, an inspiration after he spotted online the work of Ralph Blakelock, a painter who came from the Hudson Valley.

“His work was misty/mystic landscapes. I found it to be a wonderful style,” Grad says. “I started to paint like him.”

It morphed.

“Now I have my own style,” he says.

He points to his first painting of this period.

“A little hut. Swirls. My own world. I won’t say I’m a surrealist,” he says. “But if you have a guy with two giraffes with a cart and a rhinoceros, it probably has an -ism at the end of it. But I don’t know what it is.”

It is a long and winding path from the first painting he made with that first kit.

Yes, he remembers.

“Typical. A big orange sun, and trees in front.” Grad says. “It’s always a landscape.”

Patrons can view live the nine paintings by Grad by making an LPL Express Visits appointment at lpl.org/explore/express-visits-and-grab-it-and-go/grab-it-and-go-lpl-garage-holds-pickup/.

For more photos of Michael Grad’s paintings at the LPL go to lpl.org/blog/apprenew-blog-post/.