Artistic Relief

February 2024

My free time has taken a delightful turn. I’ve taken up watercolor painting and it’s suddenly all I think about. I drive around town looking up at the sky and cloud formations. I look at a landscape and wonder what paint colors would capture it. I lay in bed and wonder how I could improve the strokes I used on a previous painting. I wake up ready to accomplish a new project. In other words, I’m obsessed.

I say this knowing my passion for this new hobby may wane. But I don’t take my passions lightly, and I don’t normally flit from one thing to another. I’m that responsible hobbyist who buys all the materials, takes a class seriously…secretly hoping to be teacher’s pet… carves out a place and time and rues the day it might come to an end. That’s not to say I ever become an expert or perfectionist at any of the hobbies or sports I do, I’m not. I’m happy with a tick above just good enough.

I write this because of the gift in this for me, a gift to my grieving days that now stretch out close to three years since my son’s death. I have been stuck. Just going through the paces of everyday. My grief has certainly eased and evolved and transitioned from the early days. I’m fine. But to find something that absolutely inspires me to feel creative again is a major pivot.

And here’s the other reason I write this. It only happened because I set an intention to do a difficult thing out of my comfort zone. I was downright resistant to the idea of painting. Three close friends of mine recently took it up and when they’d asked if I’d join them, I’d tell them “I’m no good,” “I’m not interested,” “I’m not artistic in that way,” “It stresses me out,” and finally the words, “I hate painting.”

I cringed when I heard myself say the ‘hate’ word. That’s when I took a hard look at myself. Seriously, how can I hate something I haven’t even tried or learned? That’s just a negative mindset. And so I willed myself to try. I took a little watercolor tray on a trip to Hawaii recently and tried my hand at a few paintings.

Turns out, I was indeed awful, stressed  and no good. But again, no one had ever taught me to paint.

So I came home, bought two online courses from Instagram accounts that popped on my thread (yes, the algorithm worked for those content creators). I bought good paint and paper, set up a little area and then picked up a brush. Three weeks and thirty paintings later, I’m still at it and loving every project.

Paint to paper. Sentences typed into a Word document. Signing up for a new exercise class. Taking that first lesson on Italian cooking. The magic can’t happen if you sit on your hands and think you’ll be no good, or you don’t have time, or you’re too sad.

I know sad and busy and inadequate. I know! But I also realized a few years back during my Year of Yes that you gotta just make a choice to go beyond excuses. That year was full of failed attempts, but it sowed the seeds of relationships and interests that I'm still reaping.

With that lesson behind me, I took a gamble that being intentional might work even in my debilitating grief. I couldn’t say Yes to everything anymore. My bandwidth is very limited and, even still, I need to shutter myself away from the world occasionally to be kind to myself.

But I don’t want to automatically say No anymore. I don’t want to say I “Hate” an idea anymore without trying. Sure there are a lot of things you won’t be good at, but you’ll never know when a spark of joy is going to sneak into that thing you thought you’d hate.

And let me tell ya, it feels good to be laying in bed thinking of Cerulean blue and Viridian green and Quinacridone Rose watercolors, and the images I could create, instead of some of the other crap that’s lined up ready to occupy my grieving mind.

Last night at a dinner party, I heart myself say, “oh I hate to cook.” Dang it. The negative mindset slammed me in the face. This morning I’m diving deep into a couple of cooking Tic Tok creators I’ve been scrolling past. Bon appetite!