"EX-VOTO: A RELIGIOUS OFFERING IN ORDER TO FULFILL A VOW" Keith Achepohl's extraordinary collection of Italian silver ex-voto is comprised of culturally supercharged objects intended for individual spiritual communication with God.  The votive objects are made of silver, tooled and formed 'into a message'. The ex-voto represents a long history of respect and reverence for 'the sacred body' that has over time accumulated new meanings and connections to physical miracles, immortality, and Christian faith.
Achepohl was attracted to the 'little metal objects' when he encountered them first in Venice and began collecting without directly relating them to his own (printmaking) practice. "The act of creating or bringing visual life to an idea is thrilling and why our 'work' place is the greatest refuge we have from the fractious life we sometimes have to endure. That is not work. When I think about the handmade ex-votos I love so much it is to think that they were not 'work' to make either - they were made with love."   
Excerpt from Kate Wagle's book "Keith Achepohl: If It Please You Lord" "Vernacular of The Miraculous", published in connection with Hallie Ford Museum of Art at Willamette University exhibition "Keith Achepohl: If It Please You Lord" 2014

JOURNEY is a suite of watercolors created during one of Achepohl's month-long travels in 1990 from Aswan, Egypt to Venice, Italy.  In these earlier works the blue seems most representational even though the artwork overall is highly abstract. The blue represents the Nile and Egyptian sky, or often it is a background color of the desert sky, as the images shape-shifted in the water trails inspired by the Grand Canal of Venice.
Just as with Achepohl's Mediterranean watercolor series, EGYPT: DAY & NIGHT, MOZAIK,  and CAPRICCIO, he repeatedly created variations on a motif, exploring its nature, showing a sophistication of composition in the relationship between colors and shapes, distinctive in his changing interpretations of the ancient landscapes he explored.

"Achepohl talks about Venice's famous resort, the Lido - its beaches, the sand, the ebb and flow of tides, the shells retrieved - as the genesis for his impressions.... smaller more personal vistas immediate vision just at one's feet - a few shells just revealed by the last wash of tide or the shallow water caught in a slight depression in the sand... in these small vistas he has captured the transitory magic of the beach for anyone who has spent time at the shore and walked along that delicate juncture of sea and just-firm sand. ... and Achepohl has captured one very quioxotic bit of this tidal world, the kelp .. these images ask you to pause, to remember." David Kiehl, Whitney Museum of American Art, NYC

"The numbered, yet non-sequential arrangement of time in SKUNK CABBAGES, POND LILIES, and WATER IRISES belongs to what John Charles Ryan refers to as kairos ("timeliness" or "the right time"), rather than chronos ("time as a grid")... As a form of "vegetal temporality", plant-time is "a multidimensional plexity that embodies the endemic land-based seasons, rhythms, cycles, and timescales of flora in conjunction with human patterns... (i.e.) In Pond Lily No. 5, the difference between a lily pad and an abstract shape hovering in empty space appears arbitrary. Textural variations provide the main clue to this material and existential difference, but the assemblage of forms ensures that any alterity remains indeterminate. It belongs at once to the living, breathing plant, and to a higher plane of existence..." Cory Gundlach, University of Iowa Museum of Art