My daughter, Brooke did a marvelous thing, she is one of the featured artists who is displaying their work at the Stonebrook Winery at Newport on the Levee. They put her photography work on a wall there and she wanted to bring her mom and me down to have a look.

It wasn’t difficult. As I’ve discussed, my wife and I love Newport on the Levee. We love the Irish Pub there, and we love Mitchell’s Fish Market. In fact, one of the best dishes my wife makes is Voodoo Shrimp that the cook at Mitchell’s in Newport gave her personally. We love the view of the city from Newport on the Levee, so it is with great pleasure that I learned that my daughter was a featured artist.

Here’s her website:

http://www.brooketownsendphotography.com/

My daughter is a tenacious photographer. The world is her playground and everything is a subject of her art. In fact, she and her sister are excessively creative people who have a unique perspective on the world, and they capture those perspectives in their work.

My son-in-law, my wife, and my two daughters hit the levee in the sporadic rain as frequent lightning sizzled across the sky. This created some unusually wonderful light over the cityscape of Cincinnati while along the river was an Italian Festival complete with funhouses, Ferris wheels and Italian food of every kind mixed with the fresh rain and persistent fragrance of the Ohio River.

While walking through the winery, it was a pleasure to see patrons looking over my daughters work while sipping from their glasses of wine. I sat in a rocking chair hand-made by a retired engineer and relished it’s comfort as I watched my daughter answer questions about her work and discuss the aesthetic relationships between her nature photography and her self-portraits. Naturally her political photography is stunning, and her Washington D.C. pictures are unlike any I and many others have ever seen.

One of the greatest pleasures in life is to create something that wasn’t there before you made it and then share that with people to enjoy. Among those of us present, my youngest daughter is an excellent illustrator, web designer and photographer in her own right, of course my daughter being featured, my son-in-law a social network guru and entrepreneur. My wife has made a blanket for every child and married couple brought into our family for almost two decades, and I’ve written books, designed t-shirts, been a Wild West performer, a screen writer, an independent filmmaker, and I’ve started and ran several businesses, so among us we’ve had a lot of experience. Every endeavor doesn’t work out, in fact most don’t, but it never gets old to start a new venture and study the dazzle on customer’s faces when they experience something they never would have felt if the artist had not brought those emotions about through some form of art.

If you are looking for that special something to put on your wall that needs some life and energy injected there, go down to the Newport on the Levee Stonebrook Winery and Art Gallery and look up Brooke Townsend. She’ll be the most spectacular photography at the exhibit, so you won’t miss it, and do yourself a favor, and get yourself a gift of vision that will give back to you each time you look at it. And enjoy the journey of getting there, because Newport on the Levee is always a fun place to visit.

Rich Hoffman
https://overmanwarrior.wordpress.com/2010/12/04/ten-rules-to-live-by/
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