Our Story

My journey to creating Wade Art Unbound is, in a word, a miracle. I spent 30 years serving as a military chaplain. In 2018, 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.  For my health, the military chose to medically retired me. It 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 that 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 fairly well lost and hopeless…and filled with 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 do neither despite a solid “try.” I truly was broken, hurting, and rudderless.

Then by chance, I discovered a children’s acrylic paint set my wife had bought me when in better times I announced a new and improved creative journey to replace the failed, frustrating, and expensive attempts of the past. 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, which I have gratefully included in my gallery. Something had happened to allow me to take the pictures in my noggin and put them onto canvas in some sense of coherence. With the encouragement of my beloved family, I painted more…and more…and more. The response was usually “you did that?” from family and friends alike.

Somehow, a weird brew of stroke and PD unleashed a latent talent that had been locked away by my healthy brain. And so, I imagined into existence “Wade Art Unbound – unbound because it was trauma and disease and pain and brokenness that broke free  my creativity. Yup, there are mistakes and much to be learned. But I like to celebrate my errors on the canvas, and in life. They remind me that beauty arises just as easily, if not more so, from imperfection than it does from that which is flawless.

And so, here we are together, you reading my story and me knowing you too have some latent talent that has been bound up inside you. Now we come to “our” story – the part where you allow your worst days to unleash talents and potential that only a “breaking” event can force open and let loose and I encourage you to see the miracle unfold in us. So, let’s get at it and give to our world a little beauty. I believe in you!  Soli Deo Gloria