“Painting is an act of consciously letting go.

Beholding. Responding. Releasing.”

Every autumn, my friend Katy brings me dahlias from the little farm up the road where she lives. For several years now, she brings me buckets and buckets of dahlias each week, as long as they are in bloom. The gorgeous blossoms fill my house with color. They are like bright jewels: glowing yellows, fiery oranges, deep reds. Sometimes I come home to find bouquets waiting for me on my front steps. Other days, Katy texts me and asks if I want to meet her in the field, so we can pick the dahlias together. I like those days especially, because then we can talk to each other about life, our struggles and hopes. We give each other support and encouragement.

The cyclical abundance of dahlias in my life naturally inspires a lot of paintings. Katy has told me that she loves to see all my dahlia paintings, and that she gets a vicarious sense of pride whenever I sell one of those paintings. And I love to paint them!

However, the thing about dahlias is that they demand to be painted now, and they won’t hang around until later, either. I must drop everything else I’m doing in order to try and capture these glorious bouquets. Otherwise, they fade away, and all I have is my memories. I guess this is true with many things in life. Maybe everything…

In her book How to Do Nothing, Jenny Odell writes “Hockney valued painting because of the medium’s relationship to time. According to him, an image contained the amount of time that went into making it, so that when someone looked at one of his paintings, they began to inhabit the physical, bodily time of its being painted.” I love this concept. It makes the act of painting into something magical.

I recently started writing a poem about my desire to capture time before it changes. Painting, and especially painting dahlias, is sort of like trying to paint my teenage children, to catch them in the act of growing up. Because my kids are growing at an incredible pace. I can almost observe them growing as I paint them. It’s wonderful and heartbreaking at the same time.

This obsession with painting my kids constantly, this feeling of desperate urgency…is it a deluded attempt to try and stop time? To try to hold my kids close to me forever?

Of course that can never be. And so, painting is an act of consciously letting go.

Beholding. Responding. Releasing.

Generous Permission

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