Full disclosure: This piece profiles an artist who happens to be my husband, C. Bruce Morser.

His retrospective show, “8,000 pencils, 45 years, 6 careers” is now on view through April 27, at Vashon Center for the Arts. His talk on creativity, “If I Only had a Brain,” is slated for 7:30 p.m. Wednesday, April 16, in VCA’s Kay White Hall.

Bruce and I have been married about the length of time that spans his retrospective. For almost half a century, I’ve watched my husband draw innumerable, tiny pencil lines, eventually morphing into an illustration that, nine times out of ten, leaps right off the page, alive and vibrant. I still don’t understand how he does it.

On Bruce’s desk stands a large, cut-glass bowl filled to the brim with 8,000 half-inch pencil stubs, the remains of minuscule marks that created images on countless pieces of plastic film, many shown in magazines or etched on wooden installations, ghostly drawn beneath adventure watercolors, and blooming into intimate portraits, and pages in a book.

Include endless boxes of nails and screws, mounds of sawdust, worn out paint brushes, depleted watercolors, and it all adds up to a pretty impressive resumé. But what I appreciate most about the work my husband the artist creates is, no matter the medium, it arises out of the heart rather than the head, and reveals the way he sees the world.

As one longtime friend said, “No one ‘sees’ what he sees, and we are all grateful.”

Bruce is a confirmed, classic dyslexic but that doesn’t explain it all. What he sees and creates is not so much about drawing a realistic-looking tree or an identifiable face; rather, it is all about the shapes and lines, colors and contours, the light and dark patterns. It is not just a pictorial representation — it is an expression of his relationship with everything around him along with his wish to communicate that vision, to tell a story, to create a dialogue, and he does so with the engine of his heart and the fuel of joy.

Art became his medium because, for better or for worse, he could not spell or write very well. If you come to the show, you’ll see his “first book” from second grade, “The Tru Book uv Vallcno.” Not a speller, but he could make things, and his passion for learning how the world worked informed the subjects he chose to investigate — like the discovery he made at age 7, when he drilled a hole into the dining table his father made and, with great excitement, announced to his family that the table was hollow. You can imagine how well that was received.

The six careers in the show’s title represent six different visual forms — illustrations, installations, photo-real paintings, portraits, watercolors, and books — that belie a common interest in expressing the underpinnings of the world together with the theme of storytelling. Bruce is a storyteller, and his artwork tells intricate verbal stories, which naturally led to his four-decades long career as an illustrator.

Bruce had two commercial art reps, one in New York City, and Pat Hackett in Seattle, who represented him throughout the Northwest. She would often say he was an “easy sell. Clients loved working with him as he could analyze/dissect/draw anything and make it look great: diamond jewelry; corporate portraits; NASA’s International Space Station; one of Starbuck’s first brochures that revealed exactly how their different drinks were concocted; Orville and Wilbur Wright’s famous plane for National Geographic; fashion for Lord & Taylor; cutaways of everything from buildings to Kenworth trucks to human anatomy.”

Detailed illustrations meant hours of research then more hours bent over a drawing table, while a burning urge to construct large, three-dimensional objects slowly simmered, eventually igniting into installations that merged fabrication with drawing.

“Citizen Soldier,” commissioned by ArtsWA on behalf of the Washington State National Guard, stands two-stories high. It took over our house for a year, with completed sections stored in the studio, our dining room, the garage, the front porch, until he finally fastened them all together. Before that, we dined next to the panels for “Changing Center,” his installation displayed in the lobby of VCA, and before that? Let’s just say there were others.

When I first met Bruce, his passion for wheeled engines — cars, motorcycles, airplanes — led to large, photo-realistic paintings that challenged the boundary between reality and illusion, between movement and light. Canvases spanned 12 feet across, filled with life-sized people; painted fabric stretched over a bicycle frame, which he built then rode on the track before exhibiting it in a museum. Those are only two of many.

And then there are his portraits. He’s drawn thousands, and to his delight, a bit of magic transpires with each portrait. He often forgets who he is drawing or that he’s drawing a person, beguiled by the patterns and textures, relying purely on feeling. At some point, he said, “The magic occurs, and the pattern becomes a likeness that has a bit of heart to it.”

Bruce enjoys a challenge and for a hand that’s made zillions of tiny pencil marks, the unforgiving and fluid nature of watercolors became the oftentimes frustrating antidote to his tightly drawn images. Mostly the watercolors come out while traveling, such as during his cross country bicycle adventures.

Together with his friend and fellow artist, Bob Horsley, the duo would stop daily and pull out watercolors to paint the places they encountered as they first biked from Cape Ann, Massachusetts, back home to Vashon, and then along the Great Divide Trail from the Canadian to the Mexican border.

Coming full-circle from the “Tru Book uv Vallcno,” Bruce’s next book, some 60 odd-years later, “Memories of Castle Island,” will be on sale in the gallery, with the original drawings on display. It tells a sweet, coming-of-age story about our daughter and her imagination; really, it’s Bruce’s “tru” creative imagination, but it began with their shared experience on a special sandbar.

A screening of the book, set to music and video-edited by Michael Monteleone, will be a centerpiece of “If I Only Had a Brain,” Bruce’s talk on creativity — a subject of endless fascination for him, and as VCA Executive Director Allison Reid once noted, “his own level of creativity is immeasurable.”

These are enough words from me. Bruce’s work, at least some of it, will fill VCA’s gallery and atrium, so you can see it for yourself. There is one final disclosure, however: In addition to the engine of his heart and buoyant creativity, there’s his humor. It’s probably what I like the best. After all, I’ll admit it: I married Bruce, artist or not, because he makes me laugh.

Purchase tickets to Bruce’s talk on creativity, “If I Only had a Brain,” at 7:30 p.m. Wednesday, April 16, in VCA’s Kay White Hall, and find out more about his exhibit, at vashoncenterforthearts.org.

Juli Goetz Morser, a writer and editor, served as The Beachcomber’s arts editor from 2013 to 2018.

Original drawings from “Memories of Castle Island,” by Bruce Morser, are included in a retrospective of Morser’s career at VCA, and a screening of the film version of the book, video-edited by Michael Monteleone, will be shown during a talk by Morser on April 16. (Courtesy photo)