I don't envy the decisions facing the family of a prolific Baltimore artist who enriched both the Woodberry-Hampden and Bolton Hill neighborhoods for many years.
Sally Harris — along with daughters Holly and Heather Harris and Laurel Harris Durenberger — has preserved the legacy of her husband, Les Harris, who nearly 40 years ago began an artistic odyssey in a series of cheap rented rooms in a part of Baltimore that, at the time, was far from fancy.
Les Harris, who was born in Hampden, died in 2008 at age 84. Since then, his wife and daughters have lovingly kept his spirit alive in what he curiously named the Amaranthine Museum at 2010 Clipper Mill Road, adjacent to the Woodberry Kitchen restaurant.
Now their 10-year lease on the museum space has come to an end, and the family is starting to address the question of what will happen to Les Harris' paintings.
The works are a mind-blowing sequence, representing artistic periods starting in the 1980s and stretching back to before ancient Egypt.
An art teacher who worked with students in theater design at the Park School, he enjoyed big spaces. Some of his epic works weigh 150 pounds.
They are more than a touch theatrical. Like a good play, Les Harris' works draw you in, tell a story and entertain. He had a deep understanding of the use of color, and his sense of whimsy was as original as his compositions are unique. He was also a master frame maker.
The Amaranthine Museum is a lovely, skylighted chamber in the old Poole & Hunt Foundry, where the artist first rented space in 1977. A decade ago, as the renamed Clipper Mill was being rebuilt, developer William Struever offered a lease to continue showcasing Harris' works.
It was never a commercial art gallery. Nothing was for sale. Harris refused to sell any of the paintings he made at Woodberry.
Now times have changed. Woodberry is a fancy, stylish Baltimore destination, and "it gets more difficult to afford keeping his works on public view as the rent increases," said Holly Harris. "Wouldn't it be wonderful if someone or some institution took it and toured it through the country?"
The museum will open Sunday for its final day, beginning at noon. A closing party begins at 2 p.m.
More than 20 years ago, I spent an afternoon with Les Harris. The occasion was an artists' open house in ungentrified, unrestored and pleasantly ramshackle Clipper Park, the Woodberry campus of industrial buildings that once housed the foundry. His studio was then elsewhere in the complex.
I recall his enthusiasm and absolute delight in taking a guest on a tour through his self-created labyrinth in had been the plant's administrative headquarters.
I was captivated. I admired his off-center sense of aesthetics. I also had great reverence for someone who was doing what he loved.
He was not alone — there was a small army of other artists there: sculptors, potters and ceramists, and woodworkers. They had created an artistic community at the old foundry.
I'll never forget the night a year or so later, on Sept. 16, 1995, when I got a call from a Baltimore Sun editor telling me the old Clipper Park was on fire. Seeing the fire, in which Baltimore City firefighter Eric Schaefer died, I presumed Harris' art had been destroyed. After all, you could see the red glow from miles away.
But somehow, Harris' gallery was spared.
On Sunday, his works will have a final public viewing. And, for the first time in 40 years, they will be for sale.
"We have a whole series of his art at our Bolton Hill home," Holly Harris said. "His work at the museum has become a part of us enough that we are now ready to let it go."