Yep. That’s what I’ve been up to the past few days. Ever since I last moved my office, about three and a half years ago, all of my art supplies, a whole host of prints and original paintings and drawings, and more miscellaneous stuff than you can imagine—all of this has been piled floor-to-ceiling in one of our extra bedrooms. This week I decided to dive into that mess and see what I could find. And I found a whole lot. I found lots of dust, a few cobwebs, boxes of my favorite pencils, original work that I had forgotten I had created, and boxes upon boxes of prints of some of my work.

Many years ago a couple of fellows tried to start a fine art print business. And one of the artists they wanted to publish was yours truly. I had never wanted to go into the print market myself. I loved the idea of the original work I had worked so hard to create being purchased and passed down through the years. Prints, to me, seemed like such a cheap and throw-away commodity. But as the prices of myoriginal work continued to increase, many of my friends were unable to afford the work. And well, I did need to make a living.

 

 

Something else happened along the way as well. At one of my yearly openings, I set the sketchbooks I had used that year around the gallery for folks to look at. In my sketchbooks werenot only the initial drawings I had used to create the larger work, I also had various thoughts, ideas, quotes and even prayers that were meaningful as I was working on those paintings. Person after person came up to me that night to tell me how powerful it was for them to read what I had written alongside of seeing the work itself.

The prints that were eventually made reflected those sketchbook pages. A quicker watercolor sketch with one of the meaningful, at least to me, quotes or thoughts or prayers hand-written in pencil right with it.

This is one of those paintings—of my favorite watercolor brush. This one holds so much water and pigment and just flows so nicely across the paper. And my prayer almost every time i use it is simply this, “Paint in my life a portrait of Jesus.” I just want to look more and more like him.