Wildflowers & Artistic Identity

Thursdays on my Facebook page, I've been playing along with Throwback Thursday, hashtag #tbt , posting paintings that are several years old, and maybe hold a special meaning or memory. I thought it would be fun to let my web site join in, so to start it off I'm sharing this botanical style watercolour, painted way back in 1998. This is the painting that defined the beginning of my artistic career.

When I painted this, I was young, just twenty years old, a few months away from marrying Wade, and I remember clearly sitting at the table in my apartment, carefully shading the petals. It was a tentative process, but exciting, because what was appearing on the paper was, for the first time, nearly equal to what I had envisioned when I sat down to paint. Through my teens I had dreamed of being able to legitimately call myself an artist, and was basically waiting for permission to do so. This painting was my green light, the moment I realized I could be an artist, and not be ashamed to define myself as one.

Years later, I see things a little differently. Art has always been at the core of who I am, and that would have been the case whether my paintings were ever "successful" or not. But feeling capable of creating work of a certain calibre did give me a confidence in pursuing my dream that I might not have had otherwise. It is possible that if I hadn't had this defining moment painting, I would have hidden my art and my dreams away on a shelf somewhere, and my life would have looked very different in 2014.

But maybe not. I'm not very good at giving up on dreams. And I still love this painting.