Our Story

My journey to creating Wade Art Unbound is, in a word, a miracle. I spent 30 years serving as a military chaplain until I was medically retired in 2021. Three years earlier I experienced a brain stem stroke, followed by a diagnosis of Parkinson’s Disease in 2020. Stress exaggerates both and as a senior leader, stress was as common to my daily life as water is to a fish.  Retiring me was the right thing to do, but the loss of my career was an extraordinarily difficult experience to accept.

I tried to work but found my body and brain could not keep up with the demands of even the most simple employment. Parkinson’s Disease can cause anxiety and depression for some sufferers. I got both – added to the PTSD I brought with me from my time caring for catastrophically wounded troops and other people having the worst days of their lives. Outside the military, I was grasping for purpose while filled with an unhealthy guilt from a sideways self-critique of “physician heal thyself.”  My sense of identity was entirely bound to my calling as a minister and chaplain. Thanks to the health issues, I could fullfil neither despite a solid “try.” I was truly broken, hurting, and rudderless.

Then by chance, I discovered a children’s acrylic paint set in the back of a hallway closet. My wonderful wife bought the set back when I was on active duty, when I had mentioned exploring painting as another stab at being creative. I took that set, its rudimentary supplies, a canvas board sporting a "fill-in-the-spaces" scene of an elephant and giraffe, and created "Sunset #1." An image of that sunset rests in my online gallery and in a frame on my wife's office wall. They are there to remind me that challenges combined with endurance can yield the impossible.

Case in point,somehow a weird brew of stroke and PD unleashed a latent talent that had been locked away from me by my healthy brain. There are a lot of scientific words for how that can be, but nevertheless I painted more...and more...and more with my family as astonished at the outcomes as I was. It was when I began receivng requests by friends and family to create special art pieces for them that I imagined into existence “Wade Art Unbound" – unbound because it was trauma and disease and pain and brokenness that released the restraints on my creativity. Wade Art Unbound isn't a money making venture, though my bride says that it would be good for "income to at least equal outflow" for the sake of our budget. Rather, it exists to encourage others that may be where I was - traumatized, broken, lost and in pain - to look into those wounds and see light and beauty emerge. Wade Art Unbound isn't about perfection or making a name as a master of my art form. There are mistakes on my canvases, and much to be learned about making fine art. But I like to celebrate my errors on the canvas because they, like "Sunset #1," remind me that beauty arises just as easily, if not more so, from imperfection as it does from that which is flawless.

And so, here we are together, you and I. You are reading my story and I am waiting patiently for you to discover the latent talent bound up inside you. Maybe its painting or possibly music. Perhaps you are an author with a story to tell, a glass blower filled with light to be loosed, or someone who can mow amazing designs into grass that is a bit too long. I have no idea, but you do. All it will take for this to become "Our Story" is your journey of discovery where you recognize the power of your very worst days to unleash talents and potential that only a “breaking” event can force open and release. I encourage you to see the same miracle unfold for you. Scars and pain need not leave ugliness. Together we can let those journeys give our world a little beauty. Soli Deo Gloria