It’s hard for me to clean out drawers, especially in the kitchen. Everything there once had a raison d’être, whether a Walmart receipt or an unidentified key. Yet most of it should be thrown away.

Except . . . when it shouldn’t. Today, sifting through the drawer of the kitchen desk, I found this scrap of paper.

Who gave me this? More importantly, why did I keep it? With the wondrous ease of internet searching, I found out why.

Crossing the Atlantic as a Celebrity Cruise Ship speaker last year, I’d just completed a talk about depictions of the sea in Music and Art. Afterwards, a man full of enthusiasm approached me. He asked, “Do you know a painter named Alex Dzigurski?” I didn’t. He pulled out a pad of Post-its from his pocket, folded one over, and started writing. “I don’t how to spell it,” he said, “but check him out, if you can.”

Today, I finally did. Alexander Dzigurski gives us a fabulous example of a political refuge who brought his artistic gifts and his appreciation to the United States. Born in Serbia in 1911, he began his life amidst the turmoil of the Balkan Wars. Political unrest, and later Hitler’s occupation of Yugoslavia, framed his youth. While a student, he lived in a Serbian Orthodox monastery and learned to restore icons. Upon graduation he studied art in Munich and then served in the Navy, where he fell in love with the sea.

During the Second World War, he was at risk of being arrested but fled and stayed in hiding. He returned to Yugoslavia after the war. Then, in 1949, distraught over the politics of Communism, Dzigurski made connections with the American Orthodox Community and emigrated to America.

Once living in freedom, he found new themes for his canvases. He continued to paint icons for Orthodox Churches. But he turned to the grandeur of nature to build his new American career. He painted the California Coasts, the Fjords of Norway, Dubrovnik’s stately sea wall, as well as America’s mountain ranges and National Parks. He painted outdoors (plein air) directly at the edge of his subject, be it a canyon’s precipice or a coast pounded by surf.

Dzigurski’s paintings may not be as known today as they were at his death in 1995, but they should be. They are wonderful! Moreover, his story is a key to so much our 20th-century American Artistic Culture: painters, choreographers, composers, conductors, fleeing political danger and bringing their talent to America.

This film clip from the 1970s features his joyful connection to the nature he painted. After enjoying it, you can see more of his paintings here and read more about his work as an Icon painter here. And remember, before you toss away scraps of paper with mysterious words on them, stop a second to think: “Why did I keep this?” You might be happily rewarded.