"People like Rick Borg and William Hawkins justified what I did," says Isik. "They showed me it was okay to do what I was doing."

Isik's first show was held at the King Avenue Coffeehouse, which led to subsequent showings at places like Waldo's on High and Roy G. Biv. In many ways, his timing couldn't have been better. Works by "self-taught" or "folk" artists - titles that could be immediately applied to Isik's work - became a near-mania for art collectors in the early 1990s that has yet to subside. He attributes much of his success to having his work fall into the hands of the right buyers. People who have enjoyed and bought his paintings have also worked within the art world at making their investment more valuable.

He often finds that he has been exhibited somewhere after the fact - shown as part of someone's collection. Isik maintains contact with most of the people who own his work to keep track of where it's going. One woman told him that that one of his paintings hangs next to an original Andy Warhol in her house, while two more of his paintings hang like bookends for a Roy Lichtenstein. "She told me that my stuff looks better than his," he says, more than a little slap-happy from lack of sleep. "I wish I would have thought about that earlier, then I could have named my show 'I am better than Lichtenstein.'"

Isik is also included in collector's guides, such as Chuck and Jan Rosenak's prestigious 1996 volume on contemporary folk art, where he is cataloged pages away from "self-taught" luminaries like Hawkins, Howard Finster, and Elijah Pierce. But while high-gloss pictures of his paintings appear in Folk Art magazine's gallery advertisements, Isik resists the labels he's been saddled with.

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