Singer

The First Flight This is my painting of one of the most famous and most reproduced photographs of all time. Probably nowhere else in the annals of scientific achievement has the singular moment of achievement been so documented as in the photograph of Orville Wright’s take-off of man’s first successful powered flight on December 17, 1903 at 10:35 a.m. on the Dunes of Kitty Hawk, Kill Devil Hills, North Carolina. I had never seen a painting based on the photograph, although I had seen paintings depicting fictional scenes of the flight and other flights of the Wright Brothers. Therefore, I chose to paint the original photographed scene albeit in an impressionistic style for color and interest. I had the opportunity to go to Kitty Hawk for the Centennial Celebration of Flight, December 13-17, 2003. The admission ticket and National Park museum seal of December 17, 2003, the centennial day, is pasted to the bottom right corner of the painting, memorializing the 12 seconds that changed the world. Oil on canvas 2003