Trust The Process

I’ve wanted to paint for years. Big paintings. Enormous paintings, even. Having been fascinated by Jackson Pollock ever since I was a kid, I first began to toy with the idea of creating my own work when I started following Belinda Rogers, an Australian artist. Getting an intimate look at her creative process allowed me to feel like creating art was possible. Her work with colors inspires deep emotional responses in the viewer, and I’ve been in love with her art from day one.

Financial realities of being a very broke freelance writer (and single parent) meant that those big canvases remained very far out of reach. Painting felt like a distant mirage, one that I could dream about, but never actually reach. Until the day I realized that in fact, I did have access to an enormous canvas. A gigantic one even!

I live in a nondescript white ranch-style house, built in the 1950s in a little town on the Olympic Peninsula of Washington State. The house faces a quiet road in a neighborhood that edges rural on the outskirts of town. The back of the house faces a small bit of woods, no neighbors, and no prying eyes. With that in mind, I went to work sanding down, filling, and priming a long swathe of that back-facing exterior. And presto, a canvas to get me started.

Who says you can’t paint wildly on your own home? The woods certainly don’t mind the splashes of color. Sometimes you just have to do the thing, others’ opinions be damned.