This gold, yellow, brown, orange, red and black ballpoint pen ink drawing of Auguste Renior might gather your attention? Jerry Siths multi-color impressionistic ink drawing is dedicated to Renior out of love and respect! My oil-based inks and computer have modernized or brought his delightful portrait into this centurys perspective!***** Auguste Renior (1841 - 1919), the best loved of the impressionists today. Renior is a joyous painter, so convinced of life's goodness, which seems apparent to him on every hand, that he feels no need to philosophize or moralize about it. If he does not comment, it is only because he does not find it necessary to ponder "the meaning of life." He finds life so wonderful that simply to participate in it gives meaning to existence.***** As a boy -- his father was a tailor from Limoges, poor and with a large family -- Renior was apprenticed to a decorator of fine porcelain. He copied onto cups and plates flowers and other motifs from the eighteenth-century court painter Boucher. Their fresh pinks and blues, their vivacity, their prettiness (a word of which Renior was never afraid) always remained a part of Renior's paintings. Of Boucher's Bath of Diana he once said that he kept going back to it again and again, "as one returns to one's first love." ***** Renior entered the studio of a painter named Gleyre in 1862. As a student and then as a young painter with no resources and no patrons he kept himself alive by doing occasional porcelain painting and some hack commercial work, including the decoration of window blinds. Monet was having the same struggle and the two men were good friends. For a few years Renior grouped about, imitating photographs briefly and working for a while in the manner of Delacroix. He later destroyed these pseudo romantic productions, and the earliest Reniors we have, from around the middle 1860's, show how much he learned from Courbet. ***** It is typical of most painters who work over a long period of time that their late work is painted most loosely, with greatest freedom. This was true of Renior, and the natural tendency was exaggerated by a physical malady that appeared as early as 1881 and had begun to cripple him by 1890. In his old age rheumatism had so paralyzed him that he had to paint in a wheelchair with his brush strapped to his hand. When a foolish visitor asked him how he managed to paint such beautiful pictures under such difficulties, Renior rebuked him with "One does not paint with one's hands." *****