This earring is a tiny part of a 2'x4' painting I started in
the beginning of 2016. You can tell the
earring is tiny from the size of the canvas weave. I painted it with 1 hair of a brush. That's just too tiny for me to paint, let alone see!
This painting leaned against the wall, the bookcase, the
fireplace for months. I started to resent the damned thing because I
didn't know what to do with it. I had
an idea; I just didn't know how to bring the idea into reality. I leaned it up against a heavy chair that I
had also started to resent, and varied my time between ignoring both or glaring
at both.
One day, I decided to move the chair to the basement. This was something I'd been afraid to try
because when I say the chair is heavy, I mean it's really heavy with cast iron
parts inside. It's also big and
awkward, with legs which prevented me from using a dolly. There's also doors and corners to negotiate
from the living room to the basement.
I shoved and hefted the thing to the top of the stairs, then
realized the only way to get it down to the next step was to lean over the high
back of the chair to grasp the arms, then lift, then drop, lift, drop... with
visions of tumbling head over heels to the cement floor at the bottom. I debated the pure stupidity of the risks,
and did it anyway.
Somehow, the removal of the red chair made me feel more
kindly towards my red painting. I
painted over some of the red with blue and felt more kindly still. I started working on the painting in
earnest. Perhaps some people can't
understand how furniture moving can have a lot to do with creative expression,
but I'm pretty sure others will understand painting the living room walls might
help even more. How many artists through
the ages painted glittering jewelry for those living opulent lifestyles while
the artists starved and shivered in their studios while glaring at something
intrusive in their spaces?
This painting has been hard for me to do because the point
of it is to address negatives -- and I don't enjoy dwelling on negatives. I want to force bad memories into the
darkest places in my mind. Elina
St-Onge wrote, "Every painful emotion... is like a child in distress.
When we repress them, it is as if we purposely lock this child self into a
room, forcing it to relive a trauma alone and behind closed doors while we
look the other way. In other words, it is self-abuse."
What if all of those painful emotions are precious inspirations?
If I ever complete this painting, you can tell me what
you see in it. In the meantime,
painting it has been a journey of looking for abandoned children in locked
rooms. It's a process of discovering
what really matters to me, which is often wrapped around my worst
memories. Perhaps, the only real path
to happiness is through the places we avoid?
