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4 When the heart of what he's trying to express on canvas escapes Red, he*11 put it aside. "I've got eight or ten canvases that I haven't worked on in a year," he says. "I go on to something else and hope that what was wrong with the other one will eventually come to my mind." ?ç :V Mrs Skelton is an artist in her own right, a graduate of the Art Center School in Los Angeles, and it is she who encouraged her husband to take up painting fifteen years ago. It's just in the last yeaf, however, that Red has worked steadily at painting, with forty canvases to his credit t during this time. "The paintings take me anywhere from an hour and a half to three hours," the clown reveals, with more honesty than most painters who assure you th&t each canvas took months to complete. Some of Red's paintings are still lifes of fruit and flowers, others are of animals and one especialy out standing work shows a charming little French town which he first modeled from his supply of cigar boxes. However, the majority of his work is appropriately enough, of clowns. Some of his paintings are those patterned on real life clowns such as Paul Jerome, Bozo Snyder, Felix Adler and Lou Jacobs. People often comment about the elongated faces and big eyes of Skelton's subjects. "The first thing I notice about a person are his eyes," he explains. "To me, the eyes are the furnace of the sail, and when I apint, I exaggerate to capture the true person aaa as I see him." "Why are the faces so thin?" "Again, it's because I'm tryibng to express the real person, not the fat faaxfast that they might have accumulated through the years. That's not really an integral part of their personality." Red and Georgia Skelton have a fine collection of the works of such artists as Renoir, Vlaminck, Andrew Wyeth and Margaret Keane in their home plus, of couse, some of their own work. Thus far, Red has turned down all bids on his paintings, although he has donated several to charity to be auctioned off.