July 2015

Several years ago, the summer before my first semester of college, I went on a trip with a few friends to Breckenridge, CO. We spent most of our time playing board/card games and mountain biking, but we also took the opportunity to walk around the town. One of the stops we made along the way was a little cafe where we had breakfast. While we were waiting for our food, I noticed that there were paintings hung up on the wall that were for sale from various local artists, and one of them immediately caught my eye: an acrylic painting of seahorses with vivid colors and extraordinary texture. I had never seen anything like it! The paint was so thick that it looked like some of the texture had literally been carved out of it with a toothpick. In addition, the bright orange and red from the seahorses contrasting with the blues and greens of the water and seaweed was gorgeous. I continued to admire it while we ate, and before we left I took a picture of it, trying to get the painting in frame as much as possible. This is that picture I took back in 2015:

Later that day I set that picture as my phone wallpaper. I thought the colors were amazing and over the next few months, I went from liking the painting to loving it. I saw it every single day on my phone, and I never got tired of it!

Fall 2016

About a year later my phone died, and when my new one came in I decided it was time to have a new wallpaper. Seahorses were great and all, but perhaps something more minimalistic would fit better alongside my apps. The new picture lasted as my wallpaper for all of 12 hours before I had returned to the seahorses. Throughout the next couple years, I tried every once and a while to change my phone wallpaper, but always with the same result, I never managed more than a single day before the seahorses were back to stay.

2017-2018

Over the next couple years, I became obsessed with this painting. It was not just my phone wallpaper anymore, but I had zoomed in on the face of the large yellow-orange seahorse and set that as my avatar on pretty much every website I used. And it was around this time that I realized a fatal error with the original picture I had taken: in my desire to get the picture of the painting as high-detail as possible, I had neglected to get the artist’s name. There did not seem to be an obvious signature on the painting either. Somewhere around this time, I began in earnest to look for the artist. At very least I wanted to say “thank you” for creating this beautiful painting that I have seen every day for the last several years but ideally, I wanted to track down the original painting itself and purchase it if possible. At this point I had joined the Navy, so I had enough income that I would definitely purchase the piece if I had an opportunity to (and if the price was not exorbitant, of course).

The first searching method I thought of was Google Image search. If you take pretty much any painting and copy thie image into Google, it can pull up information for you such as the year it was created, the dimensions, and the artist. However, copying my picture of the seahorses into Google gave no results. The artists must have never uploaded online, so there was no data to find. Unfortunate that the most obvious searching method didn’t work, but there were other things I could try.

I was pretty sure I remembered the paintings in the cafe being from local artists, so I tried to find some sort of artists’ registry for Breckenridge in hopes that I could ask around there. While I did find a few websites and shot off emails to several individuals who seemed to have somewhat similar painting styles, after a few weeks I was no better off than I had been before. No one had seen the painting before, no one had any idea who might have created it.

2019

I still had two more ideas to track down the artist, and I was not giving up until I had thoroughly exhausted my lines of attack. The next time my family and I went out to Breckenridge to snowboard, we stopped by the cafe to see if they kept records of artists whose art had been on sale there. Fortunately, the cafe was still in business, and they did in fact keep records just like I had hoped! I was extremely excited to finally have a lead after all the dead ends, but that excitement quickly vanished when I told her I had seen the painting in July 2015. The hostess told me that the records she had only went back to late 2016. I asked if the older records may have just been moved, and she talked to the owner of the restaurant to see. Unfortunately, the older records simply did not exist anymore, and I had hit yet another dead end.

My final idea was simply to put my story out to the world and see if anyone else had other painting-finding techniques that I hadn’t thought of. I went to What Is This Painting and asked for help. No luck. Zero ideas. I figured the journey was over, and it was time for me to accept that the best I was going to get was the original picture I had taken 4 years ago. Fortunately, it really was a pretty good picture, and I never had any complaints about the quality as it appeared on my phone wallpaper or on my various online avatars.

Still, one of the things that stood out to me from my memory of seeing it in the cafe in the first place was the excellent use of texture, and that is something you simply cannot replicate through a photo. If I was ever going to see that texture again, I would have to track down the original, and that seemed further and further away from a possibility. Maybe if I had succeeded in my search back when it began in 2017 the artist might still know who bought it and have contact information for them, but the chance of that still being true now was pretty slim, even if I could figure out who the artist was.

I laid the case to rest. Disappointed that it was unsuccessful, but satisfied in knowing I had truly run my options dry.

2021

Gamma is a friend I met through playing games together online (the username I have on that particular game is “Furyborn”). He was doing a drawing, and his question got us started talking about the origin of the seahorse I use as my avatar. I talked about how I had been trying to get in contact with the artist for years without any success, and he decided to do an image search of the painting himself. To my absolute shock, it actually got a result. The painting appeared on an online shop at FineArtAmerica where there were options to buy mugs, pillows, printouts, etc. of the painting. And attached to that website was the artist’s name: Nino Gabashvili. Finally. After years of searching and making absolutely zero headway, and having essentially set the matter aside for over a year, I had a name. The website also had a function to email the artist so I composed a short message telling her that I had seen the painting years ago and was curious if she knew who owned the original, crossed my fingers, and hit send.

Less than a day later, I received a reply.

Not only did she reply, but she still had the original artwork. It had never sold from the cafe in Breckenridge, and eventually she took it back and had kept it herself, not even putting it up for sale in other locations or on her online store. After all of these years of searching, the journey ended just a day after the first lead I had been given. Needless to say, I immediately jumped to accept her offer to sell the painting, and now it is hanging on the wall beside me as I write this post!

The painting arrived just a few days ago, now, and it is every bit as beautiful as I remembered. Also fun to note is that since the time I first saw it, Nino added her signature to the bottom left-hand corner. I have to wonder, if even just her first name had been present when I took the original picture, would I have been able to find her when I first started looking through various websites? Would I have seen her name in some of the earliest remaining records from the Cafe? I suppose I will never know, but I am so, so happy that the story has finally reached its conclusion, and come to the best possible ending I could have imagined.

Thanks for following along with me for my little journey, and I hope you have a wonderful year full of good surprises.

-Christopher

P.S. My phone kicked the bucket last night so I can’t take a picture of it hanging on my wall… I will update this post when I do get that picture!

P.P.S. This is the finished art that Gamma made for the special event: