SF Couple Raises $100K For Fire Relief With ‘I Love You California’ Print

Source: San Francisco Chronicle, Joshua Kosman
Photo: Leslie Lindell Photography

When Eric Rewitzer and Annie Galvin woke up on Monday morning to find the deck of their Outer Richmond home covered with ash from the North Bay fires, they knew they had to find a way to help out the victims of the conflagration.

The married couple, painters and printmakers, are the proprietors of 3 Fish Studios, an art shop at 4541 Irving St., and one of their most popular offerings — a print depicting California getting a big hug from the state bear — suddenly seemed to be getting a lot of traffic on social media. So they made a spur-of-the-moment decision to donate all the proceeds from that print to fire relief.

“That image, with the caption ‘I Love You California,’ has struck a lot of chords over the years,” Rewitzer said. “People were using it to express solidarity about what was going on.”

The two put out word of the benefit to their own mailing list, and announced it on the shop’s Facebook page. Then two of their friends — Dave Pell, who runs the Next Draft mailing list, and his wife Gina Pell, who curates an online newsletter called The What — offered to help spread the word and to match their contributions.

After the first day of their two-day benefit, Rewitzer said, the shop had raised $20,000, and the matches brought the total to $60,000. The final tally after two days was over $100,000.

“That was beyond our expectations,” said Rewitzer, adding that it would probably take them weeks to fill the roughly 1,100 orders the benefit attracted.

The design for the print is based on the sheet music for “I Love You, California,” a song written for the 1915 Panama-Pacific Exposition that is now California’s state song.

For Rewitzer and Galvin, both 51-year-old transplants to the state — he from Michigan, she from Ireland — it’s an expression of their own feelings about their home.

“Annie and I both moved here in our early 20s, and we still feel that California is the most wonderful place imaginable. That image really sums it up.”

Joshua Kosman is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: jkosman@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @JoshuaKosman

http://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/SF-couple-raises-100K-for-fire-relief