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About Us

Handmade chalk since 1992, run by the Bowman family

Eternity Arts makes lecturer’s chalk by hand in Boyne City, Michigan. The business has been running since 1992, and it has belonged to Matt Bowman that whole time.

We sell chalk to chalk artists, street painters, schools, churches, camps, agencies, and anyone else who needs the real thing — over 60 colors, plus fluorescent and black light. Most of what we ship goes to working artists and to the people teaching the next round of them.

                                               

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the Red Cross logo     Tiger Woods Foundation logo  

Matt and Bonnie Bowman

Matt started as a chalk artist in 1992 and has drawn for crowds as large as 25,000 at a time. He lived in Chicago for five years running a chalk art training program at a non-profit before returning home to Michigan in 2000 to launch Eternity Arts. He’s been making and shipping chalk from Michigan ever since. He also writes the Phase 1 curriculum, teaches Phase 2 in person once a year, and handles every order that goes out the door.

Bonnie Bowman is Matt’s wife and co-creates the chalk artwork you’ll find in the gallery. She’s also the one making sure he remembers to eat during busy season.

Matt keeps a personal site at ChalkEvangelist.com where he writes about the ministry side of the work.

Matt

How we got the chalk

The Dixon story, in short

In 2005, Dixon Ticonderoga — the only company making lecturer’s chalk at the time, and had been since 1795 — decided to stop. Matt bought out the entire remaining inventory. Forty-three hundred cases. A full 48′ semi-trailer backed into his driveway. He mortgaged the house to pay for it.

Dixon wouldn’t sell the recipes. Matt spent the next three years working with chemists to reverse-engineer every color from scratch. The white took over 100 tries. The red took six years. The black took two. Every color since has been built the same way — slowly, by hand, in a studio that started in his parents’ basement and eventually grew into its own building.

Why it’s called Eternity Arts

Arthur Stace and the one-word sermon

The company is named after Arthur Stace — known around Sydney, Australia as Mr. Eternity — a man who, for 33 years, chalked a single word on the city’s sidewalks in flawless copperplate. That one word hung on the Sydney Harbour Bridge on New Year’s Eve 1999, seen by an estimated two billion people watching the millennium turn.

If you want to know why that word matters enough to put on the side of a business, the full story is worth reading.

Eternity Arts

5568 S Korthase Rd
Boyne City, MI 49712
231-675-9210
service@eternityarts.com

For Material Safety Data Sheets (MSDS/SDS), email service@eternityarts.com with the product name and we’ll send them over.