In Search of Treasure!

"In Search of Treasure"... A reoccurring day dream of mine.

I learned a few lessons from the last map that my wife Cara and I painted together.

We had some friends over Sunday evening and it amazed me at how subjective art really is.  I asked what seemed to be strait forward questions, and inevitably everyone would confidently answer... differently.

So what did I learn then?
Consistency, unity, cohesiveness, selective variety, sensitivity.

All these terms are a book unto themselves to an artist.  My goal in this series is to create a series of interactive maps that integrate line-work, color, and... gold, into every work.  Why gold?  Because every time I think of a map I think that the maker of the map was trying to show the viewer a treasure if only the viewer were clever enough to discover its secrets.

I have for years collected gold and silver coins and old bills.  Why? It began because my Uncle Mark started my younger brother a quarter collection in 2000.  Year 2000 was when the quarters first began having the states represented on their reverse.  The face or Obverse side stayed the same, but variety was introduced in the minting and over the years, the quarters have continued to expand beyond the 50 states and onward to the territories and such.  Interesting as it was in the beginning for me, I moved on to bigger value coins and developed my collection from there.

In 2007 I had an amazing idea! (At least to me).

When Cara and I have children around the age of 8 or so, I will send them to the attic or basement to find something trivial like a flashlight or something we haven't touched in years.  Little will they know I have hidden a map somewhere nearby but out of plane sight.  This map they find will be an apparently old map.  This map however will lead to a very real, and by then, quite valuable, Treasure.  My idea is that they will come to me and Cara to show us what they've found, and I will act like its fake, so that they will be all the more interested to search it out to find out the truth.

Children love the idea of being the first to discover something even if it was man made...   Some of us never grew up... :)

This interest of mine, in treasure maps, and making memories, has motivated this series in a very different way than other projects in the past.

Here is an image of my second map in the process of being painted.  This time the map will have a blue background.  My thought is that when laying gold leaf on top of the deep blue paint, the contrast will be far greater than the previous map on neutral brown tones.

Thank you Cara for taking and editing the picture!