When an artist makes a Christmas gift.

By Anita Garner

From artist, Steve Bradford

This right here is a tile.  A very heavy tile.  Aged and glazed and whatever else are the processes by which it turned into artwork.  It’s evocative.  It’s personal.  It’s rustic, which suits my taste perfectly. It’s everything a gift can be when someone talented and thoughtful has an idea and the ability to execute it.

And so it came to pass this Christmas Eve, this arrived from a studio in Maine, carefully packaged, along with a duplicate tile.  I reached the artist to let him know I’m astonished and grateful.

This is the original artwork for my play, The Glory Road, which is about to become the book, The Glory Road: A Gospel Gypsy Life, and the artwork appears on everything to do with the story so far, script books, manuscript submissions, correspondence, websites – everything.

I love it.  Of course I was curious about the duplicate tile in the package.  Steve said the first one he made didn’t survive the process, so he made two in case that happened again.  He said when The Glory Road gets famous, I can give the second one as a gift to someone who’s been helpful in launching these projects.

Daughter, Cathleen, and The Grand came into the office to look at this new addition to my Steve Bradford collection and I was explaining what he said about the duplicate.  I’d only gotten to the part about how I could present it to someone who helped, when Cath took it and said thank you with her best award-show-acceptance face.