Coon Dogs, Out Houses and Corn Cob Wine

Gale Sparks was born February 5^th, 1952 in Ft. Wayne Indiana; he began his unusual life quest the day after graduating from high school by moving to southeast Oklahoma and becoming a cowboy. After spending nearly two years living in a line shack in the Kiamichi Mountains, he became accustomed to a rough, minimal lifestyle. Working daily as a cowboy on the ranch, and bull riding on the rodeo circuit during the weekends. After surviving a near fatal car accident in Oklahoma City, he was forced to leave the cowboy life, but not his free spirit life style.

 His thirst for adventure has never been quenched, he has he spent the last thirty plus years hiking, hunting, and fishing in forty-four of the lower forty-eight states. He has found that he is perfectly at home in a tent in some of the mangiest bear camps in Maine or a redneck haven in the wild hog camps of the Okeefenokee Swamp of Georgia. Most of the adventures were financed by bartering, system he had come up with during his days of traveling in the seventies, with a fine point calligraphy pen and a tablet of watercolor paper he traded pen and ink sketches for food and gas.

He continued to use his art as a means to his adventures by doing commission pieces for many of the hunters he befriended at reunions and hunting camps, but by now had refined his technique by using a Rotring technical pen and a supply of illustration boards in a backpack stashed behind the seat of his truck. One trip that stands out to him was a trip to hog hunt in the swamps of South Carolina, from the time he left Tennessee, for the entire trip and return home he never spent a dime, down to trading a small sketch done at the camp for a meal at an Orangeburg, South Carolina Cracker Barrel on his return home.

After enduring his fifth total hip replacement by the age of forty-nine he was forced to semi-retire from his life of adventure and take a more traveled path, but another adventure nonetheless. After ditching the college route for thirty-two years, he enrolled in Motlow Community College, where he graduated with a 3.8 GPA with an Associate of Arts degree. It was while attending Motlow that the love of writing was rekindled after having several of his short stories printed in their bi- annual publication The Distillery.

The goal of a Bachelors degree appeared to be within grasp as he was accepted at The University of the South. While attending the university it was discovered that he was just as comfortable in a lecture hall discussing philosophy as, in the hunting camps of his past. Unfortunately during the first semester of attending the university he was forced to withdraw due to health problems.

Today he is quite content to recluse on his hill; working in his studio whether it is a painting, or pen and ink that he has to get out of his system. Few know of his secret joy in occasionally working off a small batch of ‘shine with his “ back porch mini still”. There are many facets to Gale Sparks, although many feel his life has been extreme, his feelings are that the only way to live ones life is to fill it with as many different, and exciting experiences as possible and he attempts to recreate many of the places and people he has met through his art. He feels that if it wasn’t for his art he missed out on much of his life as he has lived it.