2008 - "To Lead a City "

Size: 14" x 21 -1/2"

A West end kid...always the underdog...and yet there in the fields of the school yard, he found the fun of life playing scrub on a Saturday afternoon ...acrobatting on the bicycle bars....running free in endless summers...climbing snowbanks the size of mountains......In days of past with milkmen in horse drawn carts, and oil burning furnaces, black and white with TV antenaes and Christmas eves that went on for months....and in that time that kid would grow.

Yep...and there in those fields this kid would dare to dream...that someday he would grow... to lead a city.

This is a portrait of that kid who dared to dream..Neil Ellis..who with his successful entrepreneurial business skills would go into the mayoral elections as the underdog in 2006 and take a sweeping landslide victory. He continues to lead the city of Belleville.

This portrait was created from images taken by the Artist in a photoshoot at City Hall with the Honorable Mayor Neil Ellis in May, 2007.