When I stopped painting last night, something was bothering me, but I couldn’t say precisely what it was. I had been working on a mixed-media portrait of rescued pigeon Lucito in his wedding bow tie. The bow tie was a problem. It looked patchy and incomplete, and I felt frozen. A self-doubting voice was telling me I’d already gone too far. Perhaps I’d already ruined it by starting to cover the colorful negative space that initially comprised the tie. I answered that voice by marching into the kitchen and announcing to my husband, “There’s no going back!” He didn’t know what I was talking about but said, “You’re right!”
I went to bed thinking about the tie and woke up thinking about it. Soon I sat in front of the painting, staring at it again. Haltingly, I added some patches of white paint with a palette knife. My hand wanted to go all in on the thick titanium white, but I restrained myself. I sat down across the room and stared at it. It looked incomplete; I felt unhappy. It finally hit me: When I showed one of my mentors a photo of Lucito in progress, she said she liked the bow’s negative space. This landed in my mind as “Don’t touch that!” But I felt I had to do it!
It was one of those moments we meet over and over in art and life when we’re moved to do something that goes against what we think someone else likes or wants. We have to take a leap and trust ourselves, even if it’s a step as small as adding paint to a bow tie on a pigeon.
Listen to the painting
I felt so free as I started layering paint into the space of the bow tie. Afterward, as I started writing this post, I looked at what my mentor had actually said. She said, “I actually really like the negative space of the bow. There’s something quite nice about it, even if you decide to layer onto it or paint into it.” Of course, she didn’t say don’t do it. My rule-making, people-pleasing mind plays tricks! I liked that negative space, too, and I also decided to paint into it because that’s what the painting was calling me to do; that’s where my body wanted to go—forward.
