Sacred Spaces: Heavens (#5) – Redemption 5"x7"

Redemption: 5x7 oil on canvas

This guy gave me a run for my money. There are two other paintings and one emotional breakdown buried in the layers of this work. I’m calling it redemption because it was broken and made new, but because I learned a lesson in being broken and made new while painting it.

Here’s that story:

I want my feed to be beautiful, but I also want it to be real.

I am addicted to beauty. I crave it and want to be surrounded by it all the time. I want to create beauty and I want to be really good at it. But sometimes we fail and sometimes we break and those messy things are important too. One week I finished a painting that I think is beautiful, which I eventually posted in full. And one day I came on instagram and showed my face and vulnerably shared that I was diving into the work of creating and making beauty again. And then last night this new painting failed. And I didn’t know what to do about it, so I just moved the paint around the canvas until it was one flat, ugly color and felt like an utter failure and a total imposter. Who was I to think that I could create beautiful things? Who was I to believe people would want to buy my work, or that I could produce enough to provide for my family? Or that I should even call myself an artist? The lies felt so big and so real. And so I broke down and I sobbed, and in those moments it felt like I had no business dreaming this dream that had started growing inside of me.

I am thankful that I have a husband who reminds me of who I am and of what I was created to do, because last night the opposition against this dream felt BIG. But today the light is streaming through the windows again, and I am reminded that just because I have failed in this one small way does not mean that I have failed in all ways, and that sometimes when we are pursuing the things that we feel we are created to do, the fears and the risks and the hard things feel bigger, but that does not mean that we should not do those things. Our scars and our stories make us more real and more beautiful. And maybe this painting will eventually become something beautiful as well, but it will always have this scar and this story that it will carry with it into its new creation. And maybe, just maybe, it will end up being even more beautiful because of that.