Paintings.

When we went to Uralsk in October 2006 we had heard about families having a local artist paint a family portrait while they were there. We wanted to do that. After we were there a while we finally found a guy that did that. We had his paint some for us. We asked him to paint 3 but after we decided we didn't want to spend quite that much, we told him just 2. One of the 3 of us and one of just Alex. When we went to pick them up at his little studio he had painted 2 of Alex and one of the 3 of us! he gave us the 2nd one of Alex for Free... we are still not sure why! We decided to give it to Jerry's parents. Framing paintings is so exspensive!!!! So Jerry has become a framer now too!






When we were visiting the artist in his apartment/studio we were so impressed with is work that we bought another painting that he had hanging up in there. he had a hard time letting it go, but we promised we would treat it right and frame it beautifully, after much discussion he finally sold it to us for about $500. It is amazing, it is a story of a woman that suffers from an arranged marriage, because sometimes that still happens out in the small villages in Kazakhstan!

Then at the last minute we asked him to paint us a landscape picture of the Uralsk area. he painted the picture of the Ural river with a boat tied to the shore... he added the little Kazakh flag at my request. I love it!!! We picked it up the night before we left for Almaty... it was soaking wet, he had just finished it! We had to leave it behind and friends of ours, the Bucks brought it home for us a few weeks later with them! we picked it up last winter when we visited them and had it framed.