The title is a bit fatalistic, but I feel absolutely gutted right now.
I was finally doing what I thought would be a fun thing for my VIP passholders on Discord, and was gonna whip out some of my older work to show them in one of my favorite styles from college.
I knew some of the pieces in that style were in my large canvas artfolio, so I pulled it out first, but the moment I unzipped it I knew what I was going to find and my stomach sank.

See, back in January, on my birthday, I woke up to my room being flooded. Went outside and my landlord was freaking out, because the whole house had been absolutely devastated by a pipe on our water heater having burst while we were asleep.

I went into panic mode and got the room dried and cleaned ASAP, but the first thing I went to check on was my art- at least the art that wasn’t safely in a plastic container, or that wasn’t stored somewhere off the ground, see I keep the originals of all of the art I ever do- unless someone buys it.
So I have art from as far back as Middle School.

The art that was the most at risk was this artfolio, so I beelined to it. I checked it and found that the outside was bone dry- which made sense because it was blocked off from the water and the ground around it was also dry. So, I stupidly just thought “Oh good, it’s safe” and moved it off the ground before cleaning anything.

Flash forward to today, and I open the case up and I’m immediately hit with the scent of mildew.
I have to brace myself for what comes next because I know there’s no way it’s gonna be good even if there’s anything salvageable.

And unfortunately, there is nothing salvageable. The mold had latched onto and flourished because of two of my highschool paintings. The mold itself only got to about 1/3 of the artwork in there, but the water damage was enough to entirely destroy anything smaller than 18×24, and everything that IS 18×24 is either stained brown and warped beyond recognition by the water damage, torn because it stuck to other pages, or ink has seeped through 3-4 layers onto it from an artwork that was piled thick enough away from them that this s the ONLY thing that could have made the ink bleed onto it (these are all Art quality paper, roughly 6-8x the thickness of printer paper, or matboard which is dense cardboard).

So

Now, today, I have to sort through all of this old art, take digital copies of the works that I should have taken photos of a decade ago, and then grant everything that I can’t save (and by save I just mean dry out and keep for sentimental reasons- nothing in it is fit to be displayed in a portfolio anymore and if it weren’t for sentimental pieces being in it I would have to throw it all away or burn it due to the mold damage), a funeral fire.
I’ll also need to digitally clean and remove the stains from the photos at some point, but I definitely don’t have the time or energy to even start doing that today, so that’s gonna have to be another longterm project I add to my list.

This has happened once before, it’s not the first time I’ve lost work to water damage, but it is absolutely the most devastating time because of HOW MANY sentimental pieces are being lost.

And I’m pissed at myself because this loss would have been entirely preventable if I hadn’t trusted the outside being dry and just looked inside, when I checked on the works during the flood.