Rick Parks @ The Mount Charleston Lodge

Two years ago I posted An "Ode to Rick Parks" where I talked about Rick 'The Center of the Universe' Parks complete with an old Westwood Studios video that he can be seen in. I forget how came up with that nickname 'Center of the Universe' for him, but it embarrassed him to no end.

For those of you not familiar with Rick, he was an artist who did a number of pictures on the Amiga and then began working at Westwood Studios as a video game artist. Here is a link to the Mickey Mouse Glass, but note that on an Amiga monitor you wouldn't be able to see all the pixel dithering, it just blended together. But it does prove that it was hand drawn, not scanned in. Here is another link to limited edition, signed prints for sale of "Park Avenue Evening" that Rick painted for a National Parks competition.

Sadly Rick passed away on April 16, 1996. I still remember being on the freeway, driving back into town when Mike called me on my cellphone to give me the news. I pulled over to the shoulder and sat there for a long time.

Anyway, since that posting I have gotten about half a dozen emails from people who knew Rick and it has been great hearing from everyone of them. For awhile now I had been wanting to create a Rick Parks fan page on Facebook, but after looking into it a few minutes ago, I decided against it. I'm not really an 'authorized representative' of the late, great, Rick Parks and Facebook would appear to frown on unauthorized pages of that nature. Oh well.

However, one of the things I had done to prepare for the fan page was to take a drive up to the Mount Charleston Lodge (www.mtcharlestonlodge.com - I removed the hyperlink because Avast tells me it found a trojan virus when I clicked on the 'special events' link on their page! Could be a false positive, but I'm not taking any chances.) and take a picture of the mural he had painted over the bar back in 1977. Click on the images for a larger version. You can still see his signature complete with the 'circle dot in the square' down on the lower left.

When I was a kid, my mother used to take me and my brother up to the lodge during the winter time where, after playing in the snow, we would sit around the fire pit thing that is in the middle of the room and drink hot chocolate under that mural. I remember thinking once if it was difficult to paint something like that because of all the ladders and stuff you would need. I don't remember if the stupid deer head was mounted smack in the middle of it back then or not. It was kind of a kick, to learn years later, that Rick had painted it. Another guy at Westwood had talked to the owner about it, saying he knew Rick. The guy didn't believe him and said that it was painted by, and I quote, "Some hippy kid."