I am no Chris Schnoor, but I miss him and his writing about art. My background is as a writer and a collector, not as an art historian and critic like Chris. For my first column to be about Willem Volkersz, however, is a gift, as if all this was meant to be.

He and I are both Dutch immigrants of the post-World War II generation, our lives profoundly shaped by the war. We speak the language; we identify as both Dutch and American. We are a little of both and not entirely either one, both insiders and outsiders. We both like to tell a good story. And we are both collectors!

Fourteen-year-old Willem and his family emigrated from war-smashed Amsterdam to Seattle in 1953. He was 6 when the war ended, old enough to remember the horrors. A quiet sculpture in the center of the first gallery, “Breakfast, May 5, 1945” speaks to that experience. A small folding chair stands on a tiled base. On it is a pile of 17 carved pieces of white bread topped by a nearly empty glass of milk, and Willem’s childhood dog tag. Days after liberation, a Swedish air-drop brought the starving family a loaf of white bread. Willem’s father recorded that he ate 17 slices, a father whose weight had dropped to near 100 pounds during the war, not eating if there was food so that his children could.

Volkersz doesn’t dwell on these horrors of war. Instead his art shows amazement at the wonders of America, including how much stuff there was. The ubiquitous neon signage of the 1950s was one those revelations. Volkersz was among the first artists in the United States to adopt vivid, bendable, neon-filled glass as an art medium, a way of drawing. In his work, neon is paired with painting and found objects to create a complex visual narrative for the viewer to unravel. And helpful wall texts abound, written by Volkersz himself.

In “First Camera” (2010), the neon is a line drawing of Volkersz at 14 photographing the Seattle skyline. The city is depicted in black and white, like his early photographs. The figure stands against a stack of suitcases which he uses in many of the works as a concrete metaphor for travel and immigration. They also serve a technical purpose in the works, holding the hardware that supports the neon lighting. When I met Willem this week, he had a camera in his hand; I don’t think he’s put one down since he was 14.

Travel is not just a metaphor for Volkersz; he is a Traveler. As depicted in “America the Beautiful” (2000), his first trips were as a teenager on a Cushman scooter. The painting is not what he saw on his trip, but the America idealized in his mind’s eye, a young Willem anticipating his new life.

Willem and Diane Volkersz have travelled more than most in their quest to experience America, to seek out outsider and folk art, and to photograph the work of visionary artists, like Howard Finster and Eddie Martin (aka EOM.) Along the way they also seem to have hit every second-hand store, Goodwill, and tourist trap. eBay is no stranger to them. Willem is fascinated by what America throws away and finds no longer useful, the sheer volume of all of it. He and Diane collect this detritus. Not only do objects make their way into Willem’s art, their distinguished collection of folk and outsider art has been donated to Wisconsin’s John Michael Kohler Arts Center and two other museums.

In the late 1960s Volkersz started seeing odd little paintings in second-hand stores, completed ‘paint-by-numbers’ canvases, a type of work unknown in Europe. One of these found paintings is in the show (Souvenir de Paris.) More significantly, he adopted the style and idealized imagery of these paintings and adapted it to his own purposes. The poster work of the exhibit, “Follow Your Bliss” (1994-2015) is a great example.

The crisp outlines for each color and the muted pastel-leaning coloration come straight from Paint by Numbers, and the scene could almost, almost, be the view from his Montana home. But he is messing with us. In the to-scale neon figure, a self-portrait, Willem is pointing into this blissful dream of America telling us to follow our own bliss as he has his. But the painting is an illusion, a rack nailed into the panel reminds us of that. A folding chair and a palette stand in front of the work, waiting for the artist to paint the painting?

I am most haunted by two works in the second gallery — “The Wall” (2021) and “Slaughter of the Innocents” (2006). In the latter, 23 bird figurines are mounted on individual shelves against a bucolic background. On the other side, a neon tank points its cannon at them. This work commemorates Volkersz’s 173 elementary school classmates who were slaughtered in the Holocaust, their lives as ephemeral as those of little birds. The work asks us to consider what other “innocents” may barely be remembered, and then only through cheap, discarded tchotchkes.

In “The Wall” (2021), Volkersz has painted a mysterious newspaper image of figures being helped over a wall. The black and white panel seems to be mounted on top of a Volkersz landscape, but it obliterates the dreamscape. Are they being helped to go out or come in, to emigrate or to immigrate? Toy globes placed in front suggest that you can take your pick as to where this scene is taking place — or when.

Before this week, I had not known about the work of Willem Volkersz. My bad. He is a significant American artist who happens to live in the Northwest. There is an excellent catalog accompanying the exhibit, but the greatest reward you can get will come from engaging with this work yourself.

Driek Zirinsky has collected contemporary art her whole life, a collection of about 1000 works by Idaho, regional, American and international artists. She is now giving her collection away, making good matches between the works and the institutions. It has been a great ride!