Growing up, whatever time I spent indoors was typically devoted to lying belly-down on the kitchen floor, my hands kept busy with a pencil or brush.

Except for the one time I decided to sneak a bar of baking chocolate (my first lesson in karma), I was content to while away hours drawing Ninja turtles and bewilderingly bipedal dogs.

Two decades later, I remember those hours as some of the most critical in my life. We’ve all heard the reasons to keep art in your life. I won’t spend more time on them here, because it’s better to witness them for yourself (next time you catch your kids or grandkids or little siblings drawing, take five minutes to watch them at it).

I wax unpoetic about my experiences as a kid who was allowed the opportunity to get some art in her life because I like to think of Austin as one big, little kid with art in her life.

Our work at the ArtWorks Center, the Paramount Theatre, and the ArtWorks Festival this year has been about making sure the art sticks around, and we as individuals and as an organization wouldn’t feel right closing out 2014 without taking a couple hundred words to get to one very simple point: Thank you.

It takes humans to make the art matter. So thanks for making it matter. Without you lovely people, all this art would just be sitting in a kitchen drawer somewhere, next to a bar of (very bitter) baking chocolate.