Life Lessons Learned from the Canvas

I was moving with lightning speed as an original piece was falling into place beautifully. I adored the colors in the underpainting and I felt excitement as I started laying down the first central elements of the piece. Then it happened, I hit a moment of uncertainty. Everything was looking just as I wanted and now I knew I needed to build on it and somehow I felt stuck.

I gazed at the canvas with a longing to keep moving but I didn’t know where to go. I knew inherently that I should sit with it a bit and let it settle in my mind. I needed to practice patience and give my mind some space to noodle through next steps, but I felt inpatient. It was looking so good and I wanted to keep building on that right now. I did not want to wait.

So I jumped in and started laying down some texture around the central components and it all started falling apart. I completed the textured pieces and I hated how it looked now and I longed for a way to return to what it was before. Unfortunately the texture I had added made moving backward rather hard. I couldn’t just paint over because the texture would still be there even if I changed the color. I knew it was time to halt. I had to sleep on this and think through where to go next.

Sometimes when I am creating I reach these critical junctures. I find it helpful to get outside perspectives. Because young minds think more freely, I often look to one of my boys for input. In this case, the next morning provided an opportunity to do just this with my older son. As we were walking outside I shared with him how I didn’t know what to do with the piece now. I wondered if he had any ideas. He suggested that I just keep it and work with what was there, even though I didn’t like it. He still liked it. He reminded me that sometimes other people see things differently. While I wanted to agree, I personally just could not accept where the piece had landed at this point so I was trying to think of a way of taking away what I didn’t like. I pondered if I might be able to sand it off. I mentioned this to my son who looked at me with wide eyes and said that he thought that might not end well. While I knew he was right on some level, I couldn’t resist the temptation to try because I longed for what the piece had looked like before. It seemed so perfect to me.

The minute we got in from our walk I ran upstairs and grabbed the sander. I brought the piece down to the kitchen table and started sanding. I immediately knew that there was no turning back. At the same time, I knew that the piece I once had could never look the same. I would have to change it completely to come away with something I would be happy with and that was going to take many steps and changes at this point to make happen. I actually couldn’t even figure out if it was going to be possible. The sanding just destroyed most of what I had previously. I felt like I almost needed to start from scratch. I even contemplated throwing the canvas out. Side note, I have NEVER done this in my entire life. Just to truly illustrate how very upset I was feeling at this point in time.

After the sanding I told myself I needed to step away for an entire day and really think where I wanted to go from here. I practiced patience and I contemplated where to go next. The next day I decided it was time to cover everything I had previously with darker colors. I would redo the underpainting then think through how to handle what you could see from the texture that remained.

As the new underpainting covered what was previously there, I was enthralled with the colors. Even more interestingly, the painting that I had done before had left remnants of the shapes that I really liked in the original piece. I realized that I could work with the shapes and in a way inside out the painting. I could lay texture in the area around the elements and make the new underpainting bring out the central components of the piece.

I felt deep happiness internally as I could feel how the struggle I had gone through with the twists and turns had led me to this place. This beautiful piece that was emerging was something so different and beautiful. Something I never could have imagined or set out to create if I hadn’t journeyed through the struggle that got me to this point. And in that moment, I knew the name of this piece was happiness rising.

The journey I took with this piece has a very powerful lesson. Each one of us has a journey that we will take through life. The journey will have twists and turns. It will have highs and lows. There will be times when we feel like we can’t make things right. There may even be times when we want to turn back and change things. The truth is that it is this journey that makes us who we are. It is this journey that makes us unique. It is in the journey full of struggle and change that beauty emerges.

I’d like to leave you with some powerful words from the song “Anthem” by Leonard Cohen. “Ring the bells that still can ring, forget your perfect offering, there is a crack, a crack in everything that's how the light gets in.”