Right around 4 months ago Tammy and I spent the evening at our neighbors house with a really cool local artist named Erik Sletten. Our neighbors have several of his works and we were celebrating with them the arrival of two new ones. That night I got to do something I had never done before – flip through an artists sketchbook. I was flipping through Sletten’s sketches and as I turned the page in the middle a sketch caught my attention in a unique way. A couple of weeks passed and we decided to commission the work.

This last weekend we got to do another first. We joined Erik in his studio as he started to introduce color to our piece. It was a fun evening, and a unique opportunity to connect with him and the art. Tammy and I had mixed feelings about joining him while painting. As I told him, I want the painting he would paint, not the painting I would suggest him to paint. But Erik is a cool guy, and very chatty to boot, so it was a lot of fun.

Here is our painting being birthed in raw lines. I can’t wait to see it finished. For scale, the canvas is 5.5 feet square.