Robert A McQuade

August 1947 to November 2019

Bob was a very talented and driven person. His successes include employment as a cost engineer on a major construction project right out of college, later managing a vacation home development in Vermont, operating his own home construction business, building a successful art gallery and framing business in New Hampshire, or his later in life passion for painting and photography. No matter where Bob landed he landed firmly on his feet.

Over his career he had owned a number of motorhome RV’s. In his mid-sixties, he sold everything he owned except what would fit in his thirty-two foot Class A Tiffen motorhome and took off to chase 70° temperatures and follow the migratory patterns of birds in the western US. His travels took him from the Mexican border in south Texas to Mount McKinley in Alaska’s wilderness. Along the way he occasionally make presentations of his work to various organizations.

Family members always knew by brother Bob was a talented artist. One afternoon while in high school bob sat down with pencil and paper a quickly drew three caricatures of the main characters in the 1960’s television series “Burkes Law.” We didn’t see this talent resurface until Bob was in his fifties running the Red Roof Gallery in Enfield, New Hampshire. There he held a one man show for a local water color artist who had befriended him. When the show was over Bob managed to get a lesson in watercolor painting. A couple weeks later Bob had sold his first watercolor piece of art.

Unfortunately, in 2017 while passing through Bend, Oregon on his return trip to Alaska to photograph the Kodiak Grizzlies, he was struck by extreme pain in his lower back. The medical staff at the Bend Hospital diagnosed him with multiple myeloma (cancer). Amazingly for him, this hospital had ten campsites on the outer rim of their parking lot so he was able to pull in, hook up his utilities and pretty much continue his daily routines while undergoing treatment, Late in the fall, as temperatures started to drop he was released to continue his treatments on the road. His travel continued until the spring of 2019 when he was scheduled for T-cell therapy at the University of Arkansas, Little Rock, a medical facility that specializes in this deadly disease. Our sister traveled to Little Rock to be his full time care giver during this harsh therapy to save his life. On Labor Day weekend 2019, he was released and climbed back into the motorhome and made a bee-line back to New England before heading south for the winter. A few months later, on November 16, 2019 while in the Chincoteague area in Virginia, his disease caught up with him and ended his travels.

My wife, my sister and I travel to the beautiful Chincoteague to close out Bob’s affair and get his motorhome to a consignment dealership. We made a priority to gather up any of his art we could find. We were able to obtain his computer and hard drives but found little in the way of finished paintings. The couple small canvases we found remained with his sister who had given up her summer to take care of Bob during his Little Rock stay. I wasn’t for another year when I was able to crack into one of his external hard drives that I found a record of all the paintings he had finished and sold while on the road. Fortunately for all, he made a photographic copy of, what I think must be all of the finished art. In the coming months and years we hope to turn many of these into greeting cards which will be offered on this website.

Bob lead an interesting, if not unusual life with all of his career and relationship changes. Ironically, Bob’s ashes continue to travel as my sister makes her annual runs from our beloved New Hampshire to the warmed winters in the Carolinas.