Narrative:

This painting is one of my favorites; but it was also my least favorite throughout the process and one of the hardest for me to paint.

When I began, like most of my abstract work, it was meant to be a pretty clear cut meditation. Specifically, I had this goal of using this painting to focus on the concept of acceptance-the work of living in the present in life, and accepting my circumstances (rather than constantly spinning my wheels trying to change what’s outside of my control).

Simple enough.

Welp. This painting never went the way I wanted. Paint dried too quickly. Colors darkened more than I expected. I mixed my paints either too thin or too thick. Just when I thought I had figured out how to keep any more mishaps from happening…they would happen to the utmost degree.

I hated the whole process—so much that I left this unfinished in a pile of canvases for about a month. Nothing went my way.

That’s where the title (“Surrender”) came from. I finally had to accept and surrender myself to the fact that the painting hadn’t gone the way I’d planned…and somehow that wasn’t necessarily a bad thing. It was just a different thing—and life isn’t completely ruined (as I tend to think) when things don’t go my way.

I used oil paint and an oil-gouache to enable colors to run. I scraped away at the paint to mimic desperate attempts to change the circumstances of what was on the canvas…these attempts often leaving scars. I had my kids choose the colors, forcing me to work with what I was given. I washed away each coat with water, never knowing where paint would stick (on several occasions, as soon as there was a part of the canvas I really loved, the water would wash away what I had grown attached to).

Like I said, now this is one of my favorite paintings. It’s a picture of the fight to live with the cards you’re dealt, and to find the beauty in the mess.