Collector Stories
Sleepless Nights I
Billy Hollis’ painting, Sleepless Nights I, is the first artwork I ever purchased and I’m grateful not only for its beauty but also the memorial and warning it serves. For four and a half years I chose insomnia to try to solve my problems and postpone hard decisions. Billy's painting perfectly captures that reality: dark, non-descript tones, a straight-backed chair of imprisonment, head-in-hands frustration, chalk circles of endless rumination, and floating numbers counting hours awake or days or months since I last slept well. I look at this painting and am reminded of God's grace and rescue in my life and my need to choose differently—to face the underlying problems I'm avoiding rather than go back to that life of unsolved stress and sleeplessness.
Andrew Hadd
The poet Elizabeth Browning once wrote that “Earth’s crammed with heaven and every common bush afire with God.” I love the way Billy’s piece, Searching Heaven, captures this in its depiction of young children on the hunt for something in the common Earth and in doing so, transported to the cosmos. The use of charcoal and light makes it feel like they are in a world beyond this one, mining the night sky. It’s a reminder to me to heed Christ’s call to be like a child so as not to miss the heaven-crammed world, the God-saturated reality, all around us.
Danielle Pruitt