Here are some oil paintings I did many years ago when I was in junior high school and high school. I'm calling them 'Family Tree' paintings since I used to hang them in my classroom around Halloween time and joke with the kids about my ancestors. Just another way to keep the little ones on edge a bit and gain a certain additional respect.

I usually put the following Scottish(?) poem / toast on the classroom blackboard:

From Ghoulies and Ghosties
And Long-Legged Beasties
And Things that go bump in the night,
Good Lord deliver us!

All artwork shown: ©1950-60 Leo Christopherson

(Note: I sign all my art work .037 which is my first name upside down.)

My actual grandmother, Betsy, was rather mysterious sometimes. She used to read tea-leaf fortunes and claimed to have seen visions of a religious nature.

I never knew either of my grandfathers so this picture is purely conjecture based on my own personality, which must have come from somewhere, I guess.

I painted this picture of Marilyn Monroe from a photo in LIFE Magazine when I was in high school. I always hang the painting prominently and still wish for a girlfriend like this!

And this is a picture of my cousin Hughie, Dewie, and Louie. Not all schizophrenics exhibit their mental disorder so clearly.

My actual Aunt Hazel (who didn't really have such a nasty overbite), my mother's twin sister, used to look at me with raised eyebrows when I referred to her as Auntie Hazelnut.

And here's good old Uncle Boris. When I was in Junior High School I actually won $5.00 in a Halloween picture contest at a local store for this one. It's painted in both regular oils and also in ultraviolet paints. The idea was to try to fade from regular lighting to UV and back, giving a supernatural glow to the thing. It worked. When hanging in the classroom this poem went with it:

Even a boy who's pure at heart
And says his prayers by night,
May become a wolf
When the wolf bane blooms,
And the moon is full and bright.