Beauty

"Sun-Kissed"

Oil on Panel

9x12"

2013

I don’t know a lot, but it seems to me that this much is certain - life is messy.

No matter how hard you try, there are things that don’t go your way, things that don’t fit into a tidy box of how a perfect life should look. Some days – some seasons – are hard. And sometimes, life can be so heartbreaking that it’s overwhelming. But through all of this I find my life punctuated by moments of sublime beauty – moments of goodness that make me thankful to be a living, breathing part of this world.

I lost my sister a couple of years ago. She was far too young to die, and the whole thing was unexpected and awful, and I miss her. Since then, I've found myself more purposefully seeking out those moments of beauty. In darkness, I suddenly felt more gratitude for those infrequent glimpses of perfection that seem to make the messiness of life so worth it. I found solace in music, in art, in climbing the hills around my home, in the easy smiles of my kids. And as I immersed myself in those things, it seemed that things got better, bit by bit. I stumbled along, gathering up these happy moments like beads on a string, until I had created something that had started to resemble a normal life again.

It might be a piece of music that brings tears to my eyes, a masterful painting that gives me goosebumps, or a sunset that stops me in my tracks and makes me still. It might be nothing more than a good laugh with friends or my children’s warm hands in mine, trusting. It might just be the way raindrops ripple across the surface of a mountain lake on a summer evening.

I drink these moments up, greedy.

I wish I could capture these things in paint. Someday, I want to transcend the mundane details of sales and technique, and translate that gut feeling though pigment and color. I might be working on that for the rest of my life, but that challenge is what makes me love what I do.