This has been a year filled with an almost impossible amount of living. There have been beautiful happenings, people to love up, and things to take care of, and for a while my own studio simply wasn't where I needed to be. But lately, I long for it.
Earlier this month, alongside my beautiful Sicily retreat guests, I painted for the first time in a long while. It was like waking up, or a kind of sweet return. My gosh, how the body and heart remember. I realized how I’d missed it... the ceremony of it, the smell of the studio, music on, forgetting where I've left my coffee. Getting completely lost in something and making a fantastic mess along the way with a sort of controlled recklessness. The rips, the tears, the etching and scraping, then blending and stretching the pigments from dark back to light... ahh yes, that’s the stuff.
One morning on retreat, my friend asked what I was feeling when I painted the horizons I return to again and again, moving from dark into light. Rather unexpectedly, I burst open, tears leaking. I think I said, “Hope. And connection. Yes, a connection to something much greater.” And there it was... something I’ve always known. Painting connects me to something unnamed and expansive. As I’ve said here before, it’s my church and the best damn counsellor I’ve ever had.
Back home, the quieter days have thankfully arrived. This past weekend, Pete helped me deep clean and reorganize the studio. We cleared the surfaces, whitewashed the walls, moved things around, threw out the garbage and unearthed all sorts of junk and forgotten treasures, including a beautiful old book on drawing Dad gave me. I found a special place for it on my little table between the leather chairs, put out fresh flowers and new brushes, and slowly the room began to feel like mine again. A clean slate with new energy. A place to direct all this fire bubbling up.
When I think of it, longing has always had a powerful place in my work. I’ve often painted toward something rather than from something, reaching for a feeling, a place, a sense of possibility I couldn't quite name. I wasn't necessarily painting what my life looked like. I was painting something I needed from it.
There is something incredibly powerful in that kind of wanting. Longing asks us to imagine beyond what is right in front of us. It reaches toward possibility. And isn't that, in some way, the beginning of every creative act? Before we make something, we have to imagine that something else is possible.
