Sharon and I were walking around Radnor Lake near Brentwood when we came across an artist who’d been at work on a landscape (or lakescape) and was about to fold up his easel. The wind was gusting, and I asked him if he was having trouble keeping the canvas upright. He assured me things were okay, and I began to ask him about his work. I learned that he’d taught art at Belmont, where my dad was a prof in the early 1950s and that he was reconning a teaching site for an upcoming class. 

Intrigued, I continued to pester him, asking if he sold his paintings and also what his name was. He picked up the conversation graciously, and I learned that some of his work had been published by Penguin Random House. Then there was the name—Robert Blake—which brought to mind the actor who’d starred in a host of television programs and films, from Our Gang/Little Rascals to the big screen rendition of Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood to the detective series, Baretta. But this wasn’t the same Robert Blake. (Indeed, the actor Robert Blake wasn’t originally Robert Blake, having been born Michael James Gubitosi in 1933.)

Very much aware of the more famous Robert Blake, our lakeside artist had taken the path of wisdom in identifying himself as Robert J. Blake (J for John), and he’s made a name for himself in the world of art, particularly illustration. (You should check out his work as a painter and writer at robertjblake.com.) Throughout my “interrogation,” he was most amiable, and later, accommodating, as I ambushed him with my phone camera in the parking lot.

Meeting him, I was reminded of a conversation I had with a man beside whom I found myself one night on a flight from Chicago to Louisville to teach at SBTS. He was wearing a windbreaker with some sort of Christian logo on it, and I asked him about it. Turns out, he was in some sort of horse-racing-personnel ministry, and he’d been up for a visit to the Arlington Park track. He was smaller than most men, so I asked if maybe he’d been a jockey. (Children, don’t go where I went on this. Just think what he might have said: “No, why do you ask?”) Much to my relief, he said he had been, so I barged ahead: “We’re headed to Louisville. Did you ever ride in the Kentucky Derby.” He volunteered that he done it a dozen times or so. So I asked if he’d ever won it. “Just once.” Gulp. Unfazed, I pressed on, “How about the Belmont and the Preakness?” and yes, he’d had success there too. (I later read that, when he retired in 2005, he’d had 8,803 wins, nine in Triple Crown races, and that he was the leading all-time money winner among jockeys.) And I had to tease his story out of him.

The same with Robert J. Blake. “Do you sell paintings?” “Well, yes, since you ask . . .”