Hello beautiful people,
I spent this week doing what I do best - painting and thinking in relative solitude. Sometimes it works for me, and sometimes it doesn’t, and this week I found myself craving company. The refuge of a pointless meeting on my calendar, anything that could make me feel like I was part of something like a group and not flying solo.
Welcome to Pearls, a space for exploring beautiful questions of art and life.
Current cravings aside, I’ve never been great at gatherings. My way of life and work has been more like an ode to one thing, basking in its singular glory. I have been known to become captivated by one stroke, one person, the one song on the album.
But lately, I’ve been more interested in how things exist in relationship. How a shape becomes a circle, in concert with the space surrounding it. How circles become suns and moons and planets, when others join the gathering.
This is what Thich Nhat Hahn calls “interbeing” the truth that nothing exists by itself.
We only exist in relationship.
Initially my relationship with this hydrangea painting was not a great one. I was not happy with the first pass and I wasn’t sure why. My mood was dark and stormy and it was light and billowy. I was also having petal problems.
In a sea of 101 white petals, what is there to hold on to?
I started to notice how the petals related to one another. The certainty of some and the harmony of others, bonded together in an unspoken agreement to let the alphas take center stage. It doesn’t always happen this way. Sometimes elements are unbalanced, and you can tell.
There is no room for you to enter into a conversation with them.
At some point, the hydrangea and I agreed to get real. I told it secrets, about the vastness of my uncertainty, and how some weeks it swallows me whole. In exchange, the hydrangea told me a secret about myself.
What I am after in art and life is not a single element. It is not perfection, balance or even harmony, it is vitality.
Just something that feels alive.
x Jess
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