The Paint Goes Where It Wants

There was a time when I tried everything. Theatre. Books. Long walks with no destination. Music I hadn't listened to in years. I wasn't looking for a hobby. I was trying to learn something I had somehow never learned: how to enjoy being alive.

And somewhere in that time, I started painting.

I need to say this clearly, because it still surprises me: I had never held a pencil to draw anything in my life. Not as a child, not as an adult. Drawing was something other people did, people with talent. I was the one who organized, planned, made sure everything worked.

I found fluid art almost by accident. You don't draw at all. You mix acrylic paints until they are liquid, pour them onto a canvas, and then you tilt it, slowly, and watch the colors move into each other.

The first time, I tried to control it. Of course I did. I had chosen my colors carefully: deep blue, green, a little white. I tilted the canvas left, then right, trying to make the paint go where I had planned. It didn't. It went where it wanted. The blue rolled like a dark wave, the green broke through it like light under water, and the white scattered into tiny cells I could never have drawn by hand.

For once in my life, I couldn't fix it. And it was beautiful anyway.

I don't know how to explain what that did to me. I had spent years believing that if I just tried hard enough, planned carefully enough, kept everyone comfortable enough, things would turn out right. And here was a canvas telling me something different: let go, and see what happens.

That first painting is still with me. It stands on a shelf with a string of small star lights above it, and in the evenings, when the lights are on, I sometimes stop in front of it for a moment. Not because it is perfect. Because it is proof that the woman who made it was still there, still able to begin something new.

The others came after. Some of those paintings still hang in my home. A dark one, all purple and deep red, with one burning orange circle in the middle, like a sun that refused to go out.

A tall one, blue above and red below, with a thin gold line running between them, holding the two halves together.

A small round table I poured like the sea meeting the sand, which we still use every day.

Looking at them now, I can see exactly what I was feeling when I made each one. I didn't know it then.

I am not an artist. I know that. But for the first time in a long time, I made something that was completely mine. No one asked for it. No one needed it. It didn't make anyone's life easier. I made it because I wanted to, and because watching the paint move made me breathe slower.

Maybe that was the lesson. Not every beautiful thing needs to be planned. Not every good thing needs to be earned.

Have you ever tried something you were sure you couldn't do? What did it teach you about yourself?

With love, from HerWay

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