Mastering Flow: A Love Affair with Creating

I recently had someone ask me when I first started painting… I realize that to a lot of people it looks like a year ago, I just picked up a paintbrush and started selling watercolor paintings.

That’s definitely not the whole story.

In fact, my love affair with art started when I was very young. My first memories drawing and sketching and coloring are some of my first memories ever.

And, believe it or not, it did not start with a paintbrush, it started with a pen and paper. First trees and flowers, then as I grew older, I started sketching portraits with pencil. I didn’t start to truly love painting until my mom signed me up for a summer art camp when I was around 10 or 11 years old. My poor parents had finally given up on trying to get me into sports. You can bet they’re chuckling to themselves while reading this.

I remember walking into that room, putting on my little apron and picking up my very first professional brushes, the smell of acrylic paint filled the air and the first thing we were instructed to paint was a tree. It was love at first sight.

Afterward, my mom took me to a local art shop and it was even better than going to a toy store. The mediums, the colors, the brushes, canvases, the paper, the endless possibilities! I couldn’t get enough of it.

Then high school came, I doodled in my spare time, but lost touch with the beauty of putting a brush to paper or sketching portraits and forests and flowers. I suddenly couldn’t get lost in creating, something else had bloomed inside of me; judgement.

I compared myself to my peers in art class, suddenly I wasn’t good enough, so I stopped. I was so afraid of being criticized. That very fear robbed me of my ability to create.

Fast-forward to community college. I was 22, had left the cosmetology industry to go back to school. It was now time to fulfill my art credits and I thought to myself, maybe it’s time to try watercolor again…

I thrived. It was an instant love affair. Something about mixing pigment and water, watching the colors bloom on the paper, the way it moved, the delicate relationship between dry and wet and less pigment and more pigment and this dynamic dance between manipulating water droplets and surrendering all control.

From then on, I knew this was my medium. If I were ever to create with anything, it would be watercolor.

It’s now 2020. I was working a couple different jobs from home, putting myself through Homeopathy school, we were amidst a global pandemic and in all honesty, I was so bored. My relationship with painting was on again off again, it had been about 3 years since I had picked up a paintbrush but I thought to myself, it’s time to really try this again. So I dusted off my easel and off I went, once I started, I literally couldn’t stop. This need to creatively express myself just flowed through me. I devoured tutorials, I experimented, tried styles I hated, found styles I liked, and through daily practice I actually began to master something I had loved and feared all at the same time. I made friends with the voice in my head that told me I wasn’t good enough and reassured her that sometimes, yes, we won’t be good enough, but we can also never be amazing if we don’t commit to this.

So I committed. Two years later here I am, a small-business owner, selling my work, doing commissions, creating prints, I could just pinch myself.

I am growing and evolving as an artist every single day. I encounter creative blocks and find ways to bust through them, sales go up and then they go down, and though it’s a rollercoaster to work for myself, I wouldn’t change it for the world.

Thank you for coming on this journey with me, I can’t wait to show you where it’s taking me next.