BRITT — The return started with, of all things, a dead goldfish.
“My daughter said, ‘I wish I had a way to remember Finny.’ And I said, ‘Well, let’s draw Finny on paper.’”
It was a small moment, a rainy Saturday and a child grieving the loss of a pet. But for Jim DeVries, it marked the end of a silence that had lasted four decades.
Art had once come easily to him.
“Even in sixth grade, it felt like art was kind of my thing. I wasn’t a sports kid, but art was kind of the area that I felt like I excelled at,” DeVries said.
That sense carried forward, even without art classes in high school. When he reached college, he leaned into it, taking multiple courses and beginning to see the possibility of turning creativity into a career.
“I was taking several art classes, and I felt like I was doing really well with that, and kind of developing my own creative style. And some of the classes I was actually getting As in at the time, so I was pretty pumped up about it,” he said.
Then came a conversation in a portrait painting class that changed everything.
“I took a self-portrait painting class. I have never been good at portraits, as far as getting the face to look like a human face, let alone my own. At the end of the class, the professor came up to talk to me,” DeVries said.
“The professor looked at me and said, you know, you might want to come up with another option, I don’t know that you’re going to make it as an artist. That pretty much took the wind out of my sails,” he said.
The comment carried more weight than it should have.
“I was 19, so it wasn’t like I had a whole lot of maturity behind me and a lot of life experience to shake it off,” he said.
He left school soon after, setting aside the idea of becoming an artist and eventually building a career as a naturalist and program administrator. The creative impulse never fully disappeared, but it shifted into something quieter.
“I’m the kind of person that, sitting in a meeting, the edge of my notes is going to be full of doodles,” he said.
At times, it surfaced in his work. He recalled sketching an underwater view of a beaver lodge on poster board for a lesson, creating visual aids when budgets were tight.
“I would do things like that occasionally, just as a way to build a prop for one of the lessons I was trying to teach. Didn’t really think of it as art, more like drafting, creating something that was functional as opposed to artistic,” he said.
For years, that was enough.
Then came Finny.
“My daughter got a goldfish at a birthday party, and this goldfish lived in a pickle jar in a bathroom for eight years. One day, Finny died, and it was floating upside down in the tank,” he said.
They sat down together with a simple set of Crayola watercolors.
“We both painted an image of this goldfish. And I actually kind of liked how it turned out. That really was the catalyst,” he said.
That moment led to something more.
“I said, well, let me just play with this and see if I can make this goldfish, you know, out of acrylic paint too,” he said.
What began as a single painting became a habit. At first, it was occasional, a few hours a week. Over time it grew into something steadier.
“I was drawing or doing watercolor paints or acrylic paints, probably once a week, twice a week, until probably 2017. It was somewhere in there that I started doing it a little more frequently, three or four times a week,” he said.
Art became both outlet and anchor.
“It turned into being just kind of a relaxation thing for me. If work was a little stressful one day, I would go sit and draw for a couple hours just to clear my head,” he said.
When the COVID-19 pandemic disrupted daily life, DeVries found himself with more time and fewer distractions. He built a small studio in his basement and leaned fully into the work.
“I would go draw or paint for four or five hours a day, and I developed a pretty good portfolio of stuff,” he said.
That body of work soon found an audience. After seeing a call for artists, he applied and was selected for his first show at the Lyric Center in Virginia, a moment he said caught him off guard.
“I ended up creating, I don’t know, 30 or 40 different pieces that I hung in that first show and then was even more flabbergasted that people actually bought some,” he said.
Since then, DeVries has continued to show his work in galleries across the region, while also helping to foster a creative community closer to home. He now participates in a weekly open art group at the Northwoods Friends of the Arts gallery in Cook and serves on the organization’s board.
“Every Monday night, I get together with a group of other artists, we all just kind of gather around and draw or paint or whatever gets you excited about doing art,” he said.
The environment is intentionally supportive, shaped in part by his own experience.
“Don’t get discouraged. Just because somebody doesn’t like your stuff doesn’t mean everybody hates it. You know, art is very subjective,” he said.
That perspective carries into his own process, which he describes as uneven, sometimes frustrating, but ultimately rewarding.
“With every painting, it kind of starts out with this vision you have in your head, and then it goes through this ugly phase where you just think, what am I doing? This is terrible. And then it comes out of that ugly phase,” he said.
It was a process he came to understand and a process he plans to continue.
“It’s ten years into the revival, and, you know, I’m hoping it’s going to go another 20 or 30 more. I’m having fun with it, and probably will never put it down,” he said.
A selection of his work is now on display throughout April at Northwoods Friends of the Arts in Cook. The exhibit features acrylics, watercolors, and pen-and-ink pieces inspired by the Northwoods landscape and the years DeVries spent observing it, including the watercolor painting of Finny that helped spark his return to art.
For those who stop in, the show offers more than a collection of images. It is a record of a journey paused, then resumed.
And it all traces back to a goldfish named Finny.