Art prints benefit Ukrainian refugees

Findlay artist Philip Sugden is selling prints of one of his drawings, with the proceeds going to UNICEF to benefit Ukrainian refugee children. Sugden is asking for a $10 donation for each of the reproductions in the limited-edition series, and he hopes to raise at least $1,000 before sending the proceeds to UNICEF. He has already almost reached that goal, he said Wednesday. Sugden created the original drawing in Tibet a few years ago. He said he chose this piece for the fundraising efforts because the monks in the monastery depicted in the piece are known for being compassionate toward pilgrims. The monastery itself is in an isolated region of the Himalayas called Mustang. "It took us five days to get there by horseback," Sugden said. Sugden said that while some causes may be more supported by people of certain political leanings than others, "when you're talking about children" it crosses those lines. So, he picked UNICEF as the organization to receive the proceeds. On the agency's website, it's possible to send donations and specify that they are for Ukrainian refugee children, he said. He said the effort grew out of a conversation with his wife, Carole Elchert, about Ukraine in which Sugden remarked that if he wasn't working, they might fly to Poland to help. (Sugden, who has a studio in the Jones Building in downtown Findlay, is also an art professor at Bluffton University.) "So we got to talking about what we could do," he said. Sugden has in the past donated original artwork to area nonprofits. With ArtWalk coming up on May 6, he thought this might be a good time to make prints. And with the cost of digital printing more affordable, it would be easy to make a lot of them. So, he had 200 copies printed. He has sold close to 100 so far, and expects to have about 100 left for ArtWalk, when they will be available at Sugden's Jones Building studio. Arthurs: 419-427-8494