Several (many) months ago, a friend of ours Rick asked Joey if he wouldn’t mind a skillz for skillz trade.  Rick goes to our church and he’s the Executive Director of an organization called Go Nigeria; he had some video footage that he wanted Joey to turn into a promotional video for their website.  In addition to being the director of Go Nigeria, Rick is also a painter.

A video for a painting.

Joey called me one afternoon to relay Rick’s suggestion, and I was all, UM, HONEY, you just work as hard as you possibly can to make Rick an amazing video, because I HEART HIS PAINTINGS.

Like I said, this was months ago.

Joey finished a short video for Rick back around Thanksgiving, and he’s almost done with the long video.  So tonight, we went out to Rick’s house to have a look-see at what paintings he had available.  His house is awesome, it’s like an art gallery.  We had lots of fun walking around and looking at them, comparing what we each saw in each painting.  (For instance, one in particular Joey thought looked like a snowstorm in the dark, and I thought it looked like hundreds of eggs marinating in a Petri dish.  But once he said the thing about  the snowstorm, I could totally see that over the eggs in a Petri dish.  Perhaps you can see where my mind naturally goes, Internet.)

After wandering around for quite some time, we finally settled on a painting, the one that happened to be my favorite.  It’s called “Underneath the Ashes”, and I LOVE the textures and colors.

This also resembles the ground and rocks we saw at Yellowstone National Park when I was a kid.  The sulfur in the geysers do some crazy cool stuff to whatever it is that makes up dirt. I think it looks a bit like a galaxy too, don’t you?

Anybody see anything else in there?

Rick is super generous, and he also gave us the painting that had been Joey’s favorite too – a really fantastic green one that reminded both Joey and I of a sunrise reflected on the calm waters of a lake in the Boundary Waters.  It’s called “Going to Change” and I think we’ll wind up hanging it above our bed.  It’s painted on a piece of wood and weighs about as much as our car, though, so Joey’s going to affix a couple of cables on the back tomorrow so it will hang better.

Please, please, PLEASE check out Rick’s site, www.whittlesey.net.  The proceeds of his art goes to the orphans served by Go Nigeria, and I think that’s amazing.

Awesome art with a conscience.

Somebody HAS to buy O’Keefe Revisited; I have loved that painting since I saw it exhibited at Wildstock a couple of years ago.  (I really think that whoever buys it should be a reader of this blog.)

So…thanks Rick.  They’re beautiful and we love them!