ORIGINAL COPY POSTED ON INSTAGRAM DURING THE CHALLENGE
Sceneries like this are painted in layers to add depth. While I was adding my final circles around the sun before moving onto the midground trees, I realised the layers of a painting are not unlike the layers of life.
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Each builds onto the next and you can’t go back and redo one no matter how badly you want to.
Often the fact that you might have needed to go back and make a previous layer brighter, or softer or more vivid only becomes clear once you’ve added the next layer on top.
In both cases, I guess the experience to know how richly to saturate these things while you’re in the midst of painting or living them, comes with time.
But regardless of how you’re choosing to live the layers of your present life, kids or no kids, footloose or fancy, settled or nomadic, take an adage from painting and give your life the grace to fluff it up and make some blunders.
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My personal call is – if it feels right for you in the present – you shouldn’t view it as a wrong call down the line.
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I’m relieving future me of any and all rights to judge and berate past me. If the background is too saturated and the trees look wonky when I’m 80 years old and sitting on that rocking chair sipping over salted Bloody Marys then ‘oh well’ that’s the painting of my life and I reckon I would be honoured to have a painting, any life painting to gaze back on.
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📸 an absolutely breathtaking inspiration photo by one of my favourite photographers @joehanlyy
(artist retains all rights to print reproductions of this painting)
Derivative work created with permission from the photographer