Million Dollar Garage-Varhaus-Keusch
Jason
Every ten years or so, I go through some kind of internal reckoning.
It’s like I have to reprove everything I thought was true.
This last stretch—eighteen months or more—hasn’t been about belief or identity. It’s been about value. My value…relative to the world.
Who cares? Why keep going?
This pirate looked at forty, hit fifty, and made a decision.
I’ve been holding back my writing for a very long time.
And at fifty, for the first time, I feel experienced enough to comment on this world.
Not because I have answers—but because I’ve survived long enough to name the struggle. I know there are folks out there who need to hear what I have learned.
Men die in their thirties and wait around to be buried.
I ain’t dead. I’m not walking around dead. I’m not giving an inch. I’m fighting to last.
And I’m going to leave something behind—and in doing so, drag some people along with me.
The Goals
Go to heaven.
Do simple commerce.
Show people they are not trapped.
Romans 12:2
”And be not conformed to this world: but be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind,
that ye may prove what is that good, and acceptable, and perfect, will of God.”
Million Dollar Garage
I’m building a monument in my backyard. The end of the reckoning, the beginning of the action. No granite or stone—just an open garage door, some plywood, a few tents, and the parts of my studio I couldn’t afford to buy.
I’m pulling boards from the ceiling to paint on. There’s a garden, a patio, a couple saws, my wife, an old English named Noah, and three cats I didn’t ask for. I am grateful for all of it.
Million Dollar Garage ain’t worth a million. It’s barely a garage.
But it’s honest. And it’s mine. I want you to see how I grow it. or fail.
This is where the past ends and the next thing begins—without ceremony, without anyone’s permission. It’s where I drag it all into the light and do what I’ve got to do.
Paint, write, move. Every post from here is part of that. You are a part of it too.
Varhaus
I started calling my studio Varhaus in 2015.
It was a placeholder at first—just a name that sounded clean, strange, and wide enough to work under. The more I used it, the more I grew into it. It gave me space to make things without always putting my name up front.
Now it holds everything I do—art, writing, mailing, mistakes, momentum.
One day I want it to become a publisher or a coffee shop. Maybe a house for others, not just me….but a house of realized dreams…goals that didn’t take, but turned into something better than initially imagined.
But first, I have to prove it by what I make under it.
Artist Note
(Jason Keusch is a self-taught abstract painter based in Mid-Michigan. Before painting, he spent two decades in the restaurant world—kitchens, chaos, and quiet reinvention. He began painting full-time in 2016. His work has reached collectors from Detroit to the Hamptons, though that’s never been the point. This project isn’t about building a name. It’s about leaving something behind that can’t be deleted.)
