Congratulations to the man with the show

There is a present exhibition featuring an artist who now regularly sells his paintings for millions of dollars yet never do you feel money is the point. This is rare today and makes me happy, because unlike so many of his peers his work is actually about something. Something bigger than himself, too. I have a second reason for being happy about his progress. Years ago, not so long after I had witnessed my first ever firefight and shortly before I moved across the ocean to the city of the scraped skies for five years, this very artist came to me for some advice. (As I remember it, we were in a former timber warehouse the first time we met.) Anyway, though I haven't seenm him in years, he was a shy person then and is no more than a year younger than me, and though he was tall he gave the impression of not wanting to take up too much space. I of course immediately suggested I had no advice to give, in fact felt embarrassed he thought me capable of any. (If he had asked about war, then OK ... I might have had something to say.) Anyway, he picked my brain about his work all the same and I liked him immediately. We even discovered that his father before travelling the ocean and starting a family there had gone to the same school as me in the far chilly north, though naturally before my time. As for the work then, it was perhaps more about wit than wonder but still had glimmers of the respect for nature and humanity so attractively prevelant in the work today. In time, I would recommend his work to people I knew across the ocean myself, but no one responded. I remember one time wanting a fairly senior gallerist over there to show him but I was instantly mocked, though not unkindly, and it was suggested the work was uncommercial.