100 small paintings to help tell the story of one painting that survived.

For years, I’ve been telling stories through Our City, Our Story showing that Rockford carries stories bigger than people expect.

This film is another version of that same belief, only the story reaches from a pickup truck in Rockford to a museum in Białystok, Poland.

The COPYISTS AND ROCKFORD

During the Holocaust, a Nazi officer in Białystok, Poland had 20 Jewish painters copy European masterworks that he sold to make himself rich. The painters thought if they did his bidding they would survive. They didn’t. All died. Murdered at their easels, in the streets or in concentration camps. This Copyist workshop produced more than 2,000 paintings, and remained an urban myth. No known painting from that workshop had been found.

Until one was bought for $75 out of the back of a pickup truck here in Rockford, Illinois.

Tim Prince and Sarah Thistle discovered what it was.

They could have sold it for a small fortune.

Instead, they returned it to Białystok.

That matters. It says something about the people from here.

The first people to protect it were not historians, dealers, or institutions. They make bone sculptures from roadkill and SELL death ephemera.

It shows that important stories are not always born in obvious places. Sometimes they surface in an oddities shop, in the hands of people others might overlook.

They were people in our own community who looked closer and chose responsibility over profit.

That is why this film matters to Rockford. Its a city still learning how much its own stories can matter.

For my birthday, May 16th, I’m making 100 original 5" x 7" paintings for sale to help fund the next stage of The Copyists.

Each painting is an original 5" x 7" work on a chunky 1.5" gallery-wrapped canvas. No frame needed. Ready to hang. The painting is now in Poland, where conservation is beginning. I need to return to film it before anything changes. This sale helps fund that trip. It also buys the time I need to research, review footage, follow leads, build the treatment, create pitch materials, and find the human spine of the film.

A painting for a painting AND FILM CREDIT

Behind The Scenes — $150
See paintings as they are made, and claim one before the fundraiser.
Be listed in the credits and on the wall next to your painting purchased.

The First Showing — $100
Choose from the paintings available at the event,
purchase now for one hour early entry and listed in the credits.

Donate without purchase. — $100

But this is not only a film about the past.

Dan Lindsay, an Oscar-winning documentary filmmaker I went to high school with, gave me the note I needed to hear.

He said I had “a series of situations, but not yet a story.”

He was right.

The facts are extraordinary. But facts are not enough. This stage is about finding the story beneath them.

It is also about the people who found the painting, the ones caring for it now, and the strange human threads connecting Rockford and Białystok: oddities, faith, doubt, punk rock, memory, prejudice, repair, and the question of what we do when history lands in our hands.

The painting is now in Poland, where conservation is beginning. I need to get back there to film it before anything changes.

This sale helps fund that trip. It also buys the time I need to research, review footage, follow leads, build the treatment, create pitch materials, and find the human spine of the film.

For more than a decade, Our City, Our Story has been teaching me how to do this kind of work: to look closely at a place, find the people others might overlook, and tell stories that make the familiar impossible to ignore.

That is the same muscle this film needs.

I do not want to make a dry historical documentary. I want to make a human story about survival, perception, responsibility, and repair.

This is not the full film fundraiser but allowing for research and development.

remaining Paintings will be available for sale at the event.