Blog / 2025 / A Fish-filled Love Letter to the Future of Art
April 23, 2025
In the past, I’ve hated on art auctions pretty hard, and I stand by those statements. That said, I feel good about giving a shout-out to the ShadFest auction for reasons mentioned in the video, and I’ve also loved participating in two other auctions in recent years, because both those charities paid me for my labor. One split the proceeds of the auction with me and the other paid me the full amount for my art since they were confident that their auction would bring funds in well above that price. With this post I want to make it clear: artists can and should give to causes they believe in and those causes can and should focus on making artists feel valued.
The original Springtime in Lambertville is available only through the ShadFest auction—I’ll make prints available through my shop afterwards. That said, I’ve got other flower paintings for sale and some fish ones too!
UPDATE
April 28, 2025
The original Springtime in Lambertville sold for $500 at auction. You can buy prints here!
Springtime in Lambertville (The Shad in the Daffodils)
2025
acrylic on paper
13 x 10 inches
VIDEO TRANSCRIPT
Every year around this time, my small town goes into a fishy kind of artistic overdrive. A couple hundred artists—both amateur and professional—make art for an auction that supports two $25000 scholarships for kids in the area who want to study fine art, music, theater, or writing.
It’s an epic love letter to creativity, from my tiny community to the future, and it’s thoroughly quirky.
Most of the artwork is as fishy as this painting, because, forty years ago, when this great big heart for art started, the river had finally recovered from unregulated manufacturing, and the shad, a species of fish that lives in the ocean but returns to the river to spawn, had come back. Some creative people in town thought it’d be nice to celebrate this victory for nature—and for the humans who’d finally figured out that poisoning the planet wasn’t a plan for longterm success. As part of the fun-making, they decided that young creatives in the area could use a boost as they went out into the wide ocean, so to speak. That’s how the art auction came to be.
And it makes me so happy.
I currently serve as head of the scholarship review committee, which involves a lot of wrangling of letters of recommendation and other info as well as the scheduling of people, because every student who applies gets interviewed by the committee. And I think that might be my favorite part of this whole process, meeting the kids and connecting them with an older generation of creatives.
Art isn’t valued in our society. It’s nearly impossible to make a living as an artist, and it’s only getting harder as corporations take our creativity and run it through the robot minds of their so called “artificial intelligence,” finding ways to make money off of labor that they never pay for. We may not have figured out how to force those companies to share their ill-gotten wealth with the rest of us yet, but we humans know how to share. And my town’s fish-filled love letter to the future of art proves it.
Art is the love of other humans made tangible across space and time. When a person can’t get a hug from a friend, art is there to make them feel seen and understood. Please share my work with your favorite people!
Maybe this post made you think of something you want to tell me? Or perhaps you have a question about my art? I’d love to hear from you!
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