The Treasure Cave

 

The Door to the Treasure

Actually, it's more like a closet. And it will take some work, a death, and a lot of luck to make what it contains into a treasure, but it makes for a nice click-bate headline.

I've been drawing and painting all my life. Prior to 1992 I painted in watercolors, using old photographs from old picture books as references. But I realized that if I ever wanted to sell my work, I'd need to make it entirely my own work. So in 1992 I started on an imaginary journey through an imaginary land as a vagabond plein air painter, painting scenes  that I found interesting traveling the highways and byways of Cealanda. By 2003 I had painted hundreds of paintings, and with the handwriting on the wall stating that I would likely be unemployed anyway, (A large newspaper chain had bought the small daily newspaper and were hiring graphic artists that did need me to do their photoshop work) I decided to try my hand as a professional artist. Over the next five years I painted hundreds more paintings in oil and acrylic. I sold several hundred. Never for much, but that's the lot of artists. And even after I decided not to continue to pursue a commercial market, I continued to paint, for the fun of it, as I always have.

Maybe ten years ago I ran out of ideas I cared to paint, and my painting dwindled to a trickle. I almost always painted imaginary scenes, when I ran out of imaginary scenes I cared to paint I had nothing to paiting. But it didn't matter much, as I had my writing to fill the void. Writing is another thing I've done all my life.

I'm trying to get back into these days - by painting very small paintings that I can complete in an hour or two, i.e. the limit of my patience. With my  treasure cove, I don't need any more paintings because...

I still have all the paintings I didn't sell. Which was most of them. I have them stored in a closet under the stairs. Recently, after trying to select some summer paintings to put on the wall, I decided I needed real rack to hold all of them to make them easy to find and pull out. I bought one. Straightened up the closet to make it nice and neat so I and my heirs can get at the paintings easily. 

Today, I'll take you on a brief tour of that closet, so you can see the wages of not matching production with demand....

The photo above is the door to the art closet. To reach it, one must make it past the game shelves on one hand and the 2025-26 winter collection of jigsaw puzzles.

Opening the closet door we are met with two bookshelves.  Like all my bookshelves, they are actually salvaged plywood boxes that once contained printing plates - the perk of spending five years as the third shift platemaker. On the shelves most of my smaller paintings are filed standing. I have them in cellophane sleeves, two paintings to a sleeve. Most of them are 12X16" acrylic paintings on hardboard, though you can see there are several different sizes and some of them are small oil paintings. 

The plastic bag below them contain stretcher bars for the stretched canvas oil paintings that I dismantled when it came time to move seven years ago.

Below, we have  stepped into the closet and rounded the corner to look under the stairs. We have those stretcher bars, and behind them, some stretched canvas paintings, some large canvas boards, along with a couple of portfolios and a pad of watercolor canvas.

In the phot below, we have stepped further in and are now looking at my new shelves located under the steps. On the the lowest shelf are some of my standard 18x24" acrylic on hardboard paintings. I've divided  them into two groups to make it easier to sort through them. Like the smaller paintings, they are in cellophane sleeves, two to a sleeve. The second shelf up contains more 18x24" paintings as well as 16x24" ones. Hardboard comes in 48x24" sheets, so I can cut it to get either 3 16x24" or 2 18x24" boards for paintings with one 12x24" one. The 18x24" painting fit nicely into 24x30" frames with 3" mattings making them my preferred size. You don't need to frame acrylic paintings under glass, but I do, because a 24x30" frame makes them appear bigger on the wall.

Below, we take just a further step under the stairs to see where all my oil paintings are stored. They were painted on stretched canvas. You can see some of those standing against the wall on the left - stretched canvas that I bought. Later on, I bought my own roll of canvas and the stretcher bars and made my own stretched canvases to paint on. These I could disassemble, unlike the ones I bought and did to make moving them easier, and safer. All those oil paintings are stored flat in the blue box and plywood boxes beyond the shelving.

Below. The seven boxes on the top of the shelf, contain the hundreds of watercolor and thin acrylic paintings I did before turning professional, and after I did. I quickly discovered that watercolor paintings don't command a great deal of money, so I had to switch to oil and than acrylic paints. Which I hated, until I didn't anymore.

I've not inventoried the paintings I have on hand. Once I started selling them, I numbered them as I went along. My records show that I painted 282 oil paintings of various sizes, and 25 watercolor paintings ibn that period. I haven't counted all the watercolors I painted prior to 2003. I also painted 55 small, 5x7" "bookshelf" acrylic paintings, and 1,207 acrylic paintings up until 2015 or so when I mostly stopped painting and counting the ones I did. All of which is a total of 1,569 paintings that I have kept records for. I sold something like 200 of them. I haven't bothered to record paintings since then, and I don't know how many watercolors I did in the eleven years between 1912 and 2003, but they fill those seven big flat film boxes on the top shelf, likely 300-400+. Bottom line, I have a lot of paintings, to choose from when I change them out every season.  

The Summer Collection