VALDOSTA — Art and love are integral to the life of Donald Kolberg.

To love art is to love life.

To love life is to love art.

Kolberg takes the simplest forms in everyday life — the human body, a train — and places them on canvas or forms them through sculpture.

“Art is a way to communicate the feelings you get through the perceptions that you have,” Kolberg said.

Born in Levittown, Long Island, N.Y., Kolberg classifies himself as a weird teenager.

A football jock with long hair, he was also an art geek.

“A lot of artists find that when they paint, they do sculpture, they do collage, whatever kind of art that they do,” Kolberg said. “That’s the most comfortable way for them to express ideas. It’s an exciting way to be. It’s a frustrating way to be.”

The summer after high school graduation, Kolberg, with thoughts of college and plans for the future, began hearing whispers of a music festival.

The East Coast, and shortly the whole country, was abuzz about a festival of music scheduled to take place in New York.

It was the year of Woodstock.

“In 1969, I was 18 and a hippie, so that helped,” he said.

Kolberg and a group of friends went up early to see what was going on and to find a way in without tickets or the money to buy tickets.

Kicking around in the area where the concert was scheduled to take place, Kolberg met Hugh Romney, better known as Wavy Gravy.

Romney, the head of Hog Farm, had been hired to provide food and run security for the event.

“Right place, right time,” Kolberg said. “He said, ‘Hey, we need some upstanding youths to do security. Here’s an armband and here’s a shirt. Here’s a secret code word.’ We forgot most of it, lost the armband, but the shirt was cool, so I kept the shirt.”

Though hired as security it became pretty obvious, fairly quickly, that the police would maintain a type of hands-off security for the duration of the event, he said.

Before Woodstock, Kolberg got to attend a smaller pre-concert for the locals.

“We hung out for that and just kind of stayed. Nobody questioned us because we had the right credentials,” he said. “Then it was just a gigantic party. It was an incredible party.”

Kolberg said that during the festival he was in awe of the helicopters flying in and out bringing in musicians and supplies.

At one point a helicopter wanted to land to bring in more food but couldn’t find a good space to land, he said.

“It must have been about two to 300 people that joined hands and spread out and made this gigantic circle to clear the area for the helicopter to land,” Kolberg said.

He took very few things back with him from Woodstock. Memories, love beads and his security T-shirt, which he kept for decades.

“After I got the Woodstock shirt, wore it a few days, I threw it in a knapsack and forgot about it,” Kolberg said. “As I was growing up it got put in drawers and other drawers along the line. Somehow it survived up until last year.”

That is when Kolberg decided to sell the T-shirt on eBay. He decided he wanted $300 for the shirt.

When the bidding got up to $200, Kolberg was shocked and went and told Roberta, his wife. She then went and looked and was shocked to find bidding had climbed to $400.

“For $1,650 that T-shirt sold to a collector in Chicago,” he said. “We laughed for a hour. Someone loves it and that’s great. A collector has it and I had it rolled up in a drawer.”

Kolberg figures there are very few original T-shirts like the one he had left. The shirt was red with the iconic dove on a guitar neck on the back with the word peace and a peace sign on the front.

After the festival, Kolberg went back to Long Island and to college to major in the arts.

“I did the 10-year plan,” Kolberg said. “I took 10 years to get a four-year degree.”

While in college he helped produce a public television children’s series called “Periscope Up.” The series took place in a classroom and discussed nutrition, cooking, health, any subject they could come up with.

“With ‘Periscope Up,’ it was the idea it was from a children’s point of view,” he said.

Hit by the need to ramble, and partially inspired by the beat writer Jack Kerouac, he eventually hit the road for the West Coast.

While traveling he wrote what he described as a stream of consciousness article on the need to traverse the country by hitchhiking. The article ended up in “Seventeen” magazine.

Kolberg ended up in Los Angeles, where he would enroll in college. He attended the Otis Art Institute and California State University, Los Angeles.

“I didn’t receive much of fame and fortune at that point but kept working at it,” Kolberg said. “I’m still working at it.”

Today Kolberg is a full-time painter and sculptor.

Kolberg has shown his work all over the country. His sculptures are done in metal and wire mesh. The wire mesh ones are usually outlines of figures, predominately female in nature, and can range in size and shape.

“A lot of my work in that field is about figurative art in unusual mediums,” he said.

After working in the art field for a while, Kolberg decided to re-tool and went back to school to become a network engineer.

Through the years he would work for various national and international companies.

In 2001, Kolberg was hired by a company with the provision that he would be hired on Tuesday and on Thursday he would leave for China, he said.

“I was supposed to go for two weeks. Eight weeks later I was still in China doing all kinds of weird stuff and I don’t speak the language,” Kolberg said.

He was in Yan Tai in the Shang Dong province, a seaside village with a major medical center.

Kolberg said his time in China was exciting.

“Mostly I ate on the street. The street vendors there were amazing,” Kolberg said. “At 12:30 a.m. the streets would be lined with vendors. At 1:30 p.m. you couldn’t find one.”

A bit of intrigue surrounded Kolberg’s return trip home. His visa had ran out and he had to bribe his way out of the country, he said.

“Unfortunately I got on a plane on Sept. 11,” Kolberg said. “My interpreter had left on a plane an hour earlier. He got off the ground. My plane did not.”

Kolberg was sent back to the hotel in Beijing. During his wait for a plane, Kolberg hung out with people he met from England and Australia and searched for information about the terrorist attack on the news.

The information was limited and the general feeling Kolberg got from the Chinese was that the attack was not a big deal. Life went on as usual in China, he said.

When Kolberg finally got to fly home — four days later — he flew in to Newark, N.J.

“Flying home, flying over the Trade Towers, it was remarkably horrific,” Kolberg said. “You could see it in the distance and the entire plane got quiet when we got within visual view. We circled it to come into Newark. The building was still burning.”

Though Kolberg has had a variety of professional and personal changes in his life, art has been constant.

Shortly after coming back from China, Kolberg and his wife, Roberta, moved to Valdosta.

They had been visiting the area several years prior because it was where Roberta’s sister lived.

Between the two of them Kolberg and Roberta have five children and nine grandchildren, with two more on the way.

“She has her two daughters. I have my two daughters and a son,” Kolberg said.

He and Roberta met in the late 1990s, though Kolberg had known of her and been friends with some of her family members for years.

Kolberg’s son, a guitarist, began playing in bands at age 15. To be able to play in some of the establishments the band performed in, Kolberg tagged along as a chaperone.

One of the people playing with Kolberg’s son was bassist Frank Herman, Roberta’s brother.

Herman nagged his sister constantly to come to a show. She finally relented when a gig was scheduled about a block from her home.

“She showed up, I was there, sparks flew, but she was mean to me,” Kolberg said.

Roberta told him that if he wanted to see her again he had to get her number from her brother.

He gave Kolberg the number immediately.

Their mutual love of architecture and art had them spending months together rambling through towns taking in structural design and art galleries.

“It just grew into an incredible love and friendship and life,” he said.

Neither being very big on pomp and circumstance, when it was time to get married the couple hosted a barbecue and sprang the nuptials on the guests.

“We told them, ‘Oh, by the way, this is the mayor of the town and we are getting married,’” Kolberg said.

Since coming to Valdosta Kolberg has had more than 30 pieces of his art shown at the Annette Howell Turner Center for the Arts, participated in competitions at the Okefenokee Heritage Center in Waycross and has art for sale at a gallery in St. Simons.

Though Kolberg has no plans for another show at the moment, two of his pieces will be in competition at the Okefenokee Heritage Center in October.

In addition to his mesh figures, Kolberg has begun to use spray paint as an artistic medium.

“When I see people and places, artists generally see them a little different than tourists do. A tourist may look at a place and go This is absolutely beautiful. We’re having a wonderful time. Didn’t that look nice,” Kolberg said. “An artist may look at it and go Wow, I can feel how this grew into this. It’s a little bit different sensibility, not better or worse, just different.”

Some of his newest work uses spray paint and focuses on the trains and train tracks that traverse Valdosta and Lowndes County.

“There’s no brushes involved. There is an immediacy to it and accidentalness to it,” Kolberg said. “You can’t change things. They happen.”

With brush painting things can be changed or modified, he said.

“You go into it with a sense of where you are going with it, but like all art and all writing it takes on a life of its own,” Kolberg said.

In addition to art, Kolberg and Roberta broker antiques. Roberta refinishes furniture, a skill she has developed through years of owning antique shops, he said.

Kolberg currently does a monthly newsletter called Art Core, a take-off on a art group he started in California to help get new artists’ work shown.

In the online newsletter, which has an international readership, Kolberg focuses on local artists, gallery owners and art shows.

“It is my pride and joy,” he said.

Though Kolberg’s Woodstock T-shirt is gone, he has plans to attend an upcoming festival in San Francisco that honors its memory.

Kolberg’s brother, who lives in San Francisco, and who Kolberg classifies as a hippie, is one of the organizers for the 40th Annual Festival of Love.

There will be musicians that performed at Woodstock and green vendors at the event, Kolberg said.

Kolberg and his wife enjoy traveling, especially if it involves taking a road less traveled. They consider themselves people people, loving to meet and interact with those they meet along the way.

“The interactions between people is what creates life forms. It’s a running thread for me the idea of life forms,” Kolberg said. “It’s our perceptions of life and how those things affect people and affect the appearance of people which is always exciting.”

Kolberg’s Web site is www.donaldkolberg.com.