My earliest painting experiment

“The future is completely open, and we are writing it moment to moment” – Pema Chodron

Lately I’ve been trying to slow down and just breathe into all of the change happening in my life this year. I’ve never had a particularly easy time with transitions, even if they are happy ones. When I start to feel those classic symptoms of overwhelm, I often pull back to reflect and write down a series of recent little happy moments that I might otherwise forget, like finishing a new painting or reading a beautiful new comment on my blog.

So, what am I happy about today?

Possibility.

I decided to think back to October 2013, exactly one year ago, to remember what I was doing. What I found makes me laugh and feel such compassion for who I was then. For the hope that I felt painting again for the first time in 12 years. For my curiosity and my fear of the unknown.

Last October, I had no business yet. I had no paintings completed, no website, and certainly no Etsy shop. I was operating solely on my curiosity of how life could be different if I tried something new and explored my creativity in a new light.

So I signed up for an online painting class: Juliette Crane’s Serendipity.

Juliette is a wonderfully imaginative artist with a style so bold and experimental that her methods are like nothing I had attempted before. Suddenly it no longer mattered if a tree looked like a realistic tree. The ground could be orange or neon pink, and layered with little designs. Her characters could begin with elaborate wings, then turn into animals with crowns on their heads by the time she was finished a lesson.

I didn’t know yet what my style would be, but her art had so much freedom and so much joy woven through. Something shifted for me while watching her paint, as I saw her creating her own set of rules for her art and her life. And so I picked up my brush and painted, giving myself permission to stop paying too much attention to the rules I had been taught. Here is one of my first painting experiments:

While looking back on these flowers makes me smile (and laugh a bit, if I’m being honest), I also feel that this piece pinpoints the exact moment when I let go of my old belief that my paintings needed to look realistic and I began to paint whatever I felt like painting. I had no one looking over my shoulder to give me a lesson on perspective or to worry if these flowers looked anything like real flowers. My only concern at the time: was I having fun? And the answer was yes.

I think I’ve come a long way since this first experiment, but I can so vividly remember that feeling of possibility I had. The I don’t know where this is going, but I think I’m onto something feeling. The feeling of why did it take me so long to try painting again? 

And so I began to rewrite my future, step by step down a different path.

Returning to a few weeks ago, in early October 2014, I made another large shift by giving two months notice at my 9-5 job. I feel an equal mixture of nerves and excitement, but I’m walking into this future with open eyes. We’ve done our planning, and I’ll get a part-time job if I need to. In the meantime, I have that same set of feelings:

Possibility and curiosity. Hope and excitement.

Maya Angelou said ‘nothing will work unless you do,’ and I’m taking this to heart for the remainder of 2014. I’m going to show up in each moment, ready to work hard and ready to transform. Will you join me?

xo,