Look for New Painting at EAA Oshkosh AirVenture!

For the first time, Sam is doing a painting with Amelia Earhart as the subject. Mindy has been suggesting (i.e., nagging) Sam to have a woman be the focus of a painting for years. He finally listened! Of course picking Amelia isn’t a hard choice. Most everyone knows who she was, especially due to the recent movie starring Hilary Swank. Below is the sketch Sam just finished. He'll transfer it to canvas and get started painting.

Thanks to a suggestion from a Facebook follower, Sam decided to concentrate on one of Amelia’s most significant accomplishments: flying solo across the Atlantic.

On May 20, 1932, she took off from Newfoundland, Canada, at 7:12 p.m. in her red Lockheed Vega (see photo). She intended to fly to Paris to copy Charles Lindbergh's solo flight. Her flight was filled with dangers, from rapidly changing weather to a broken altimeter, to gasoline leaking into the cockpit.

When she brought her plane down after 15 hours and 18 minutes (according to one account) she wasn’t in Paris. Instead, she landed in a pasture at Culmore, north of Derry, Northern Ireland. When a farm hand asked, "Have you flown far?" Amelia famously replied, "From America." The site now is the home of a small museum, the Amelia Earhart Centre.

Now you know the story behind Sam’s painting-in-progress.

If you attend EAA Oshkosh AirVenture, you can see the finished original in person. Come to the Lyons Studio booth in Booth B (for Beautiful art), Booth 2024. If you can’t attend, look for the painting and Limited Edition prints in the next News Flash.