Grief as a companion to painting

Art pushed me into a kind of looking I had not practiced before. Before loss, painting was about preservation through composition , rearranging and recomposing what I had seen so that I might revisit it continuously and offer my idealized view. I reshaped the architectural settings of my life, the facades and structures I had walked past and through, arranging them into new configurations. I developed a vocabulary of arches, cornices, and shadowed planes that I could reorganize endlessly. The work was exploratory, investigative. My past lived there, and I controlled the terms.

After the successive deaths, something shifted. After my mother died, she appeared in a painting. Behind her stood the Paris facades I had painted many times before. I worked from a photograph of her at twelve — her gaze steady, serious, fixed somewhere beyond the frame. I struggled with her face. A painter friend said quietly, “This is your mom making an appearance.” She was right. I was no longer rearranging buildings to evoke the past. I was joining what I had lost by observing what remained.

Painting was punctuated with crying. The studio, always a place of relief and discipline, carried a new weight. Before, I entered with devotion and a bit of performance anxiety — wondering what state I would leave the work in. Grief altered that equation. I entered already undone.

I placed the funeral flowers in the studio. Decorations from a silent gathering. The last metaphor of a life remembered. As they wilted, they shifted color and posture. Petals stiffened. Roses browned. The arrangements changed daily.

I began a small canvas of a single rose from the bouquet my brother and I had chosen for her. The cracks in the petals were nearly impossible to follow. The color altered constantly in the light. Decay was not static — it was moving. I could not fix it in one glance.

Painting became a meditation on sustained looking. The longer I looked, the longer the painting required. In that looking, I could think. I could remember her. I could weep. I could offer attention itself.

Grief beside my painting practice was not grey or lifeless. It was not narrow. It was more like a raft. Because these were my feelings and my mother’s flowers, I trusted it. The current was slow. The banks were familiar. I had only to look, to breathe, and to move my brush. Painting alongside loss became a discipline of presence — and it changed me.