Is there a word that describes the feeling you get when you look at a piece of art work and your heart and soul say "yes?" John Kane was a working man from Scotland who found his way to Pittsburgh, labored with his hands while his mind painted pictures of the sights in Pittsburgh he came to love. His work is not "beautiful" or "sentimental" or "sophisticated." It is raw, and the perspective isn't always the way it should be. Some of his paintings depict the steel mills along the Monongahela pumping out black smoke. When Kennywood was a picnic spot and hadn't developed into an amusement park, Kane would hike to Kennywood with his paints and brushes. I read his biography and he is quoted as saying that his two favorite things in the world were Pittsburgh and watching the people from Scotland, immigrants like he was, dress in their native clothing and dance. He painted lots of pictures of those scenes.

He was the first to represent the "naive" or "primitive" school of art. He was the first also to receive an award for his work in that area. I wrote about his paintings in my novel "Buying A Year."