I was given an opportunity by Hayley Price, owner of The Scouted Studio and The Art Coaching Club of which I’m a member, to share my thoughts on being an artist and why I continue this intentional journey.
A journey in progress.
You can listen here:
It’s a wonderful podcast for artists. You should subscribe for both technical advice and encouragement from other artists.
Where your steps have shown themselves level, your progression easy and sweet.
This is the way.
Keep it easy.
Little landscape Christmas ornament thoughts:
I’ve been asked to teach (I say guide) a landscape workshop and so, today I was thinking of how I’d start…
“Decide what you want bigger, the land or the sky and then we’ll start.”
I recognize that’s simplified, or is it?
Paint from your heart, layer color and take color away. In the end, you’ve painted what is you and yours.
Second thought.
Random, I know.
Someone who loves to play the piano or guitar or gets joy from juggling (yes, I thought this) doesn’t stop playing because no one paid the price of admission to the show.
What shuts down creativity in less than a minute? Me, getting too high and mighty or me, pouting over lack of attention.
“Stay in the middle, middle, middle…” my granddaughter and I made up a song.
Not only to be safe on the country road, but because the view is clear, we get to follow to the end where the sharp curve sheds the straightest beam of light.
We walk to the pretty place, the beautiful completion.
Stay where your heart says you belong.
The sweet skillset that is you only.
The way you know by heart.
Months ago, we reintroduced ourselves in the parking lot. They were a family. She had a baby in her arms and another on her hip. The oldest, a boy was clinging to her legs, locked arms holding with all his little might.
A man stood by. He allowed our brief catching up, listened as she answered timidly, not meeting my eye, that she was okay. I watched all of them pile into a tiny car and slowly drive away.
She was a tough one, struggled to make up her mind that life could be better. She didn’t stay long, only enough time to bring her tiny firstborn into the world.
Then, she left the shelter, starry-eyed over her aims to try to have a “family”.
The next time I saw her, she was running the register and she saw me before I saw her. Face down and eyes of a child who’d been discovered in the wrong, she tentatively said hello.
Again, “Is everything okay?”
“Yes.”
“I’m working here now and I like it and the babies are okay.”
Smiles and see you soons were exchanged.
Yesterday, she sat on a pale pink bicycle, its basket loaded with groceries. I hurried up to see her. We talked about her bike, how much I loved it, old fashioned cruiser, no gears, simple and sort of cool.
She told me she needed it for work and how she’s not too far away but had been missing work, just came back after her daddy passed away.
Her face was stoic. He had been in a bad car accident and he never got better. I told her I was sorry.
I noticed the box of “Nutty Buddies” and thought she better get home, but she kept talking and the resolve despite her grief and trials was in her eyes, meeting mine and wide opening up with determination.
She told me she’d seen another of the shelter’s residents, this woman I thought had successfully moved on in work and raising her daughter.
She told me, “No, I don’t know what happened.”
“Well, I hope I see her too.” I said as I thought of how I wished she’d been able to stay stable, to stay in the “better than before”.
We said goodbye and I watched her cross four lanes of traffic towards her home.
I wondered about the man/father of the babies. I wondered about the other woman who has fallen back into hardship. I wondered if I should have driven her home.
For a second, I thought about the one I thought would make it, the old language of programmatic inputs and outcomes and for another second, I felt I’d failed her.
Then thought of a word God woke me with a few days ago, “shifting” and how everyone grows and then maybe dries up, withers and then along comes a little grace and rain and look it’s breaking through the hard earth, the left alone to rest soil.
Growth.
We shift to better in a moment, an hour, a day or sometimes after a long hard season of barrenness or mistakes of our making.
Acquiescence, a beautiful (even if reluctant) acceptance that may not make sense to others, but brings light and peace, resilience to our faces.
“And the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.”
Philippians 4:7 ESV
“Blue Ribbon Girl” was painted a few years ago to remember the college girl who left art and after a bit of life and shifts, is finally home.”
What’s your story? Your home?
Find your way back.
Grow as you go.
Last week, the horizon greeted me like a welcome rescue as I turned to the skinny road from the wider, more busy highway.
Both frustrated by my anxiety over the big white ghost of a Tahoe with headlights like a cat following me closely all the way and determined to breathe and be okay, thumbs on the places 4 and 8.
So, the sun rising wide over my granddaughter’s home?
Redemption. Relief.
A whisper, a sigh.
I could go on.
Thoughts rose up from an article or post I’d skimmed over, the question posed,
What is your Gethsemane?
Meaning, I supposed,
What did you ask God not to allow that He did anyway?
At first, I thought, how can we dare to compare our falling apart and asking to be spared with the request of Jesus?
Then, the mental list developed.
And then, another in contrast.
“Things that happened despite the things that happened”.
I turned the ancient wisp of pages to Mark 14 in the Bible with penciled “sermons to self”. Angela, an educator from Bibb County, Ga. added her wisdom and thoughts back in 1937, became mine because of an estate sale.
Curiously, a page is torn down the middle.
I think now of the veil torn in two.
The darkness midday.
The verses that describe Jesus being anointed with a costly ointment by a woman who was chastised is no longer here. Neither, the Lord’s Supper.
The garden scene is preserved, the plea of Jesus face down in broken supplication remains.
And he went forward a little, and fell on the ground, and prayed that if it be possible, the hour might pass from him. Mark 14:34 , KJV, Oxford
And we know what happened next, the agony, the death and the resurrection.
We know what happened because of and despite the fear in the garden.
What are your “Gethsemane moments”?
What is “scaring you to death”?
Look up, redemption will find you
And, in time pale in comparison to the unwanted anguish.
I believe. I do.
“It takes courage to grow up and become who you really are.” e.e. cummings
Last month, I noticed a new follow on Instagram. A talented photographer with an affinity for capturing beauty in found objects fresh or ancient and in spaces you’d think too battered, but made brilliant.
His images compelled me, their stories.
An invitation came to be photographed.
Surprised. I was surprised.
I studied his work, admired the portraits of others and felt drawn to each of them through his retelling of their time together, their stories of being themselves, artists.
He must be observant, a good listener I decided.
And so, I said yes to this beautiful surprising invitation to sit and be captured through his eye and his lens.
He listened as I responded to how I began painting. Then, he listened some more to the story of the ill-fitting art scholarship recipient who lost her chance and her way because of hardship, horror and harm-filled days.
Then, the always answer to my return to painting came.
“It began with the gift of a Bible in 2016. Subtle sketches in the margins of women who understood me and I, them.”
And I sat for him twice, occasionally worried I’d overshared and yet, deciding that’s not for me to say.
It’s up to the listener.
The photographer.
The artist.
The capturer of me now, the shadow of the old fading to barely there grey.
I am grateful.
And surprised.
Courageously.
In quietness and confidence shall be your strength…Isaiah 30:15
Follow Drake White on Instagram to view the other artists’ portraits and his website to view his other work.
Pay attention to the thoughts that surface, bubble up to overflow in private.
Certainties.
Yesterday morning, I closed the door and prayed on the bathroom floor.
No magic, no set expectation, just a plea that was private.
I humbled myself and asked for ease, for help.
Humbled, but not afraid, not cornered by my delay in praying nor in my honest admission of asking for help, for grace.
And, my prayer was answered. I was without pain, still am.
Around 3:00 a.m, I turned and wondered, why did I stop praying as much as before?
Praying in private, mostly.
Again, humbled by the tender realization, but not all the feeling of being punished or afraid.
More like, “I miss praying. I miss the peace of honesty and of talking to God about others and things that only we know”.
I miss me, humbled and yet, unafraid.
And so, God told me so. Told me in a way, I suppose,
I miss our conversations,
I miss the heart of you.
I delivered a painted cross yesterday, a housewarming gift that according to my friend was “extra”, other gifts and favors already given. I told her I’d like to gift another, for her office.
She gave me permission to choose the color, she’d be fine with white, she offered.
I’m thinking now about the depth in her eyes, pools of thought and kindness.
How I’ll capture that color, I don’t know yet.
I’ll pray.
I can pray. I am certain in that.
Unafraid and so very humbled.
I cried on the back road to Target.
I cried because the mean old thing called fear has been catching up, wrapping its arms around me like a stranglehold suffocating and silencing my wildest, most wonderful hopes.
I cried a little on the trip to find shelves to organize my paint (again).
Tears that said “not again”.
I’ve been hoping I was wrong about what I giddily decided was just right for right now.
I cried because my jaded conclusions drawn because of past hurts, harms, manipulative grooming and demands is putting me in the corner again.
I’ve been hoping I’ll hear they decided it was not right for me to paint and speak after all.
Then, I can sigh and sit quietly hidden in the identity that is me after all.
Alone and isolated, but safe on my own terms.
So, once the quiet tears stopped on their own, I reread the invitation to be photographed and have my artwork possibly featured with others in a future exhibit.
I reread, researched and respected the questioner, trusted it and him.
I said yes because my tears were not from fear, instead from fear that I may again be trapped in my decision to hide and that would mean
I wouldn’t go on.
Again.
It would mean ignoring how far God has brought me and that would be dishonorable.
Dishonoring myself and the one who made me to walk through doors I didn’t even knock on,
“You were not made to cower. You were made to create and to share what you make. You were made to be authentically brave.” me
Why do I write about such things, things like declining invitations because trauma triggers say “stay safe, stay humble, stay nothing, be nothing other than afraid and small”?
Because tears on the way to Target may be sweeter than you think, might be a tender gift.
Good tears, friends, very good.
I write because it helps me see the tears on the way to Target were not sad tears at all, rather than were cleansing, clarity, another swash of the trauma residual slate washed clean.
Tears that say okay, now
Take a breath, check your mascara, dab a little color on your lips.
Take a breath, say a secret prayer.
Go on.
You can.
I assembled the shelves from Target remembering the time I felt so excited. I put the bed frame together for my newly relocated to Colorado son. He’d gone to run some sort of errands, returned to realize I’d done it all wrong.
This son of mine who invited his mama to accompany him cross country, the gift of this will not, does not, has not escaped me.
I lined all my pastels, pencils, watercolor acrylic and oil tubes of paint in their own places and threw the dried up paint away.
Then, I painted.
Not as planned or expected, but I painted.
I’ll paint tomorrow.
I’ll keep on.
“For ye have not received the spirit of bondage again to fear; but ye have received the Spirit of adoption, whereby we cry, Abba, Father.”
Romans 8:15 KJV
“He restores my soul. He leads me in paths of righteousness for his name’s sake.”
Psalm 23:3 ESV
I woke with thoughts of Peter, the one who sat with the skeptics, naysayers and contrivers to crucify Jesus and said “Hey, I don’t know him, I’m not one of “those”.
So, I thought “Peter had a lot of stops and starts”.
I can relate. No big deal, you might think; but, I went very light on dinner and then caved around 10 because I really wanted my favorite comfort yummy thing.
Crunchy peanut butter on slightly toasted grainy yet soft bread and a tiny dollop of jelly, folded over, cold milk on the side.
And I slept like a baby only to wake with regret and “start again, start again, jiggity jig little fat pig!”
Regret.
Imagine if Jesus told Peter “I’ve had it with you! I mean, I even told you that you’d cave under pressure. You’d deny knowing me.”
You’d decide this calling I called you for was not possible. You’d deem yourself incapable.
Peter’s life wasn’t defined by regret.
Nor is ours. We are marked by love, by beginning again and continuing.
By redemption.
Creamy coffee in hand, I open my emails to see a reply. An online magazine is asking for photos of my art, specifically the Psalm 23 collection from over a year ago along with a newer piece, “Pool Party”.
The publication requires a bio and they pointed out what must have been a typo in the original submission.
The bio you added is pretty short – and also a little confusing? I think there’s a typo. It reads:
Artist and Author, hoping to regret redemption and hope through my words and artwork.
I smiled.
Smiled because they didn’t disqualify me because of a typo, smiled because I could never regret my redemption.
I mean, I’d be long gone, succumbed to regrets long, long ago.
It’s my redemption that calls me forward, beckons me to keep trying, put myself in places that invite my story.
Mostly, I’m smiling because all of this “reflects” the redemption and grace of God.
(Reflect not regret, the typo)
Clearly, I am imperfect; but, not unable.
Starts and stops, I can’t even begin to tell you how many.
Beginning again and again.
This is my wondrous story.
I was lost, but Jesus found me
Found the sheep that went astray
Raised me up and gently led me
Back into the narrow way
Yes, I’ll sing the wondrous story
Of the Christ who died for me. Frances H. Rowley, 1886
Only one of the five “Psalm 23” series sold. One is in my den, three are packed away and one is on display in a restaurant.
Now, I get to share how painting them connected me with the psalmist’s words, how my paintings came together to tell the story.
No regret, only and always
Everything has been and is being redeemed.
With the songs and sermon, prayers and passages, I had church today while I painted.
The thought came to do both just as I’d decided to stay home. You’ve been running, racing and getting to do lots of things.
You’re learning, that kind of running will catch up, put you in slow motion.
Take your peace away.
Funny thing, I’d never painted while “going to church”. But, I felt compelled to do it and so, I listened as I prepped tiny canvases for color.
Just as I’d listened to a new take on an old favorite, Psalm 139. Whole house silent and I heard it differently, more clearly.
The Holy Spirit’s presence.
My soul knows it very well.
I wrote just these words beside my name in the margin. This beautiful psalm is one we read to remind ourselves we are known beyond our mind’s comprehension by God who made us.
Mostly, I’ve read this psalm to remind myself of God’s intentional love and to confirm that I’m here on purpose, not an accident.
Today though, in the quiet, I saw a little deeper meaning. God knew and knows that it’s our soul that guides and informs us, that the things we need to “hear” from him, we will hear with the nudge of conviction, correction and the deepest of joys that can’t be described in words, only the pure reaction in our core/our soul. Some say gut or conscience.
How do you describe the most intimate joy of being surprised by the ease of something you feared would go wrong?
How do you describe the peace in an unexpected emotional response to something as simple as a hug from a child?
A greeting at the door with a flower and a request for a jar?
How do you describe knowing what God wants you to know that you’ve been avoiding or are afraid it can’t possibly be true?
It’s close to impossible to fully convey the soul.
That may be why David ended this Psalm this way. Sort of a brave request of God.
I’m often afraid to ask such a question.
“Search me, O God, and know my heart! Try me and know my thoughts! And see if there be any grievous way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting!”
Psalm 139:23-24 ESV
Because God knows all the beauty of us, He also knows the ways we get wrong.
Since He knows us so very well, wonderful creations, complex and complicated, we can trust that we’ll see the parts we sometimes get wrong.
If we’ll simply ask Him.
We don’t have to be afraid of the answer. It will come gently. After all, our Father is the maker of our very tender souls.
Today, I took my time, walked outside to breathe in the coming season, check on the mysterious morning glory and just because.
I stayed home.
Remembering lunch with my daughter and son on Saturday, rounding out my birthday celebrations, I recalled the sweetness of togetherness and the ways they’re so very different and deciding that’s quite okay.
Wonderfully made.
My hopes for them, always been the same, are the very evidence of that very thing, hope.
“I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made. Wonderful are your works; my soul knows it very well.”
Psalm 139:14 ESV
“And he said to the woman, “Your faith has saved you; go in peace.”
Luke 7:50 ESV
Given the choice, I prefer the quiet space alone. I love words, but prefer writing over speaking and even more so as I’m older and it’s showing evidence in both my appearance and ability.
I saw the sun on Monday morning and I thought of passages of Jesus coming to the gatherings, houses, and rescue of so many.
Healing as they welcomed him, restoring as they let Him in. Something about the sun on Monday caused me to wonder if Jesus ever wondered or even went back to say, “Who have you told about your healing?”
I wondered if the woman who had to stay home because of her bleeding happily began to sit and interact with others in the light of day. I wondered if the widow with the sparse amount of change she gave away kept living on little but with more happiness than any success could bring.
I wondered if the woman Jesus stopped the scribes from stoning spent all her days comforting other women who lost their way and needed to know life could change.
I’ve kept a piece of paper in my Bible since 2016, a sketch of an open book and a bullet list of why we all should tell our story.
Six years later, I’m surprised to even be asked.
But, I have and I have said “Yes.” The story is a more gentle one, not spattered with sorrow or bitter questions of why…it’s one of the tapestry of comfort in the form of art inspired by faith.
I’m grateful. I shared this morning as I move into this season of sharing and of learning.
Studying the lives of Sarai (Sarah) and Hagar is humbling me. Quick to be critical of Sarah and compassionate towards Hagar has always been my response to these women integral to God’s story. I even have notes in my Bible, all directed at mean old Sarah and as expected, feeling connected to Hagar, the one abused and shamed. I’m learning about culture back then, about many things.
I’ve got lots to learn as I prepare to follow through on a couple of requests I said yes to…neither of them sought by me. One in September and a second in October, sharing my story of how women in my Bible brought me back to painting and how their stories are teaching me.
I’ve got a whole lot more to learn, (I know I already said that 😊)how the love of God is not just for the beaten down women, but for the women who participated with words and actions against other women. It’s all about the power of God to redeem and the gentle call to us all…Come back, daughter.
There’s a bigger purpose for it all…pain, heartache, anger or regret. Hagar and Sarah experienced God’s love in equal measure. They were seen by God, completely.
I’ve got much more to learn and I’ve occasionally been corrected. That’s okay. I’m learning. But a sort of knock on my door came in the form of unexpected questions…can you guide women in your process of painting and speak on how connecting your art and faith has and is strengthening and changing you? Public speaking, live painting.😳
Honestly, it is frightening. I can write vulnerably about my journey and at one time I spoke quite often about the struggles of women, mental health and other things…it’d be a whole lot easier to keep sitting on the couch quietly drawing in my Bible or painting in the corner room in solitude or blogging occasionally.
But, maybe Jesus knocks and we let Him in and then He knocks again, saying come on out, let’s go and share, together let’s tell the story of the two of us in relationship. Let’s go and tell.
(I’ll be sharing more about the two events as the dates draw nearer.)
Continue and believe, learn and go.
Go in peace. You’ve been made well.
You have a story to tell.
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