Wayne Sumstine

Art Brokerage: Wayne Sumstine American Artist:At age 7, he transformed the ceiling of his bedroom in his family’s Tucson home into a skyscape of birds, angels and airplanes in a starlit expanse. In his teens, he painted his first car, a 1964 Ford Falcon, by hand. His inspiration, he says, was the colorful “magic bus” novelist Ken Kesey (of “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” fame) and his band of offbeat friends drove across country in 1964. “I did not only psychedelic blast-out colors, but images over the whole thing,” he says. He met Chloe, a Scotswoman with wanderlust to match his own, at the tail end of an earlier adventure that included a harrowing couple of months in the Nicaraguan jungle. Over the next few years the couple traveled, returning to Scotland in 1990 for the birth of their daughter. Somewhere in the early 1990s, Sumstine says, “I sort of drifted into painting.” In the years since, Sumstine’s style has moved steadily toward the abstract. In his sunny south-facing studio, a converted garage attached to his pink stucco Tucson home, he can easily spend 12 hours a day on his unique hybrid of representational and abstract works. He may have eight or 10 pieces in progress at once, each pulsing with the energy of bold brushstrokes and rich color. “I paint all the time, till I’m no longer functioning very well,” he says. Listings wanted.