Painting over the Years

I spent a Sunday painting outdoors with two of my younger brothers at my parents’ house. We wanted to do some plein air painting together with the intention to make it a regular thing.

My parents’ yard is usually pretty wild by this time of year with produce, grapes, flowers, and a crowd of pollinators buzzing through the yard. They’re not the type of gardeners to keep everything neatly sectioned. The yard is partially cultivated for some extra veggies, but it’s all mixed in with surprise plants my mom successfully resurrected, leftover bushes from my uncle’s landscaping business, and the most unexpected—miracle plants growing from the compost. We intermittently stopped to paint whatever caught our eye in between eating hot dogs and playing with my kids. My brother, Martín, put together a birthday bouquet for my mom and we each painted it from different angles as we chatted about random things. Around sunset, we opened the gate leading to the parking lot of the church behind the house to scope out a bird of prey (Michael guessed it was a falcon.) The blue jays were frantically warning each other above us in the big maple tree.

By then my third youngest brother, Gabriel, arrived and they got out the skateboards. I wandered around the unkempt church garden behind our garage. When I was younger, it was the plant dumping ground for the church’s landscaper. I liked its wild feel back then. But the way passersby used it, including neighborhood kids like me, probably led to the church cleaning it up for a Stations of the Cross prayer garden. I was invited by a parishioner to create a mural to cover the windows of our garage that faced out into the garden. He painted the Divine Mercy Jesus and I painted the Empty Tomb. I had very little experience so this was one of those early opportunities to hone my art skills.

I noticed all the stations were gone, only traces of them on the trees. The gravel paths were overgrown. One lone Mary statue with a mysterious child statue, and a plain DIY cross remained. The paint and wood on the murals finally gave way to the elements, the surface itself starting to chip. It looked a little spooky in the evening light. Within the context of an afternoon painting with my brothers, the passage of time from when I painted the mural to that moment, my children playing in the background, the same place I played at their age, I felt a gentle sense of trust in change.

I changed so much from that first painting. I’m proud of its quirks, drawing faults and all. I remember how that time was so uncertain. In the midst of difficult experiences for my family, I was eager to throw all my hope into a promising, though nebulous, art career. My brothers were young, probably still in elementary school. The church garden physically reflected a wayward trajectory winding and branching over time becoming something, then devolving, maybe in wait of a new chapter.

Even if it wasn’t the polished prayer garden it had become, it was nowhere near the dumping ground it was. It was something else, something quiet and mysterious. I didn’t fulfill my own ambitions of my younger self who painted the mural yet I had something so much more valuable than I could hardly describe. The well-being of my brothers, my parents, my own kids receiving attention and guidance, all a joy I wouldn’t know how to ask for brought together by painting and a fascination for nature.

I kept my distance from the skateboarding so as not be tempted and hop on a board to regret it later. I took pictures in the prayer garden then went back to drawing. Gabriel lent me his sketchbook and supplies to try out so I sketched the back of the house and the yard. Not really my wheelhouse, yet I didn’t hesitate. Having recently reviewed older sketchbooks to write about travel sketching for work, I unintentionally primed myself for painting and drawing on the fly. My initial rejection of drawings where I fumbled through trying to capture the subject in front of me softened or turned to admiration. This garden crystallized an attitude of trust I’ve been trying to articulate for drawing on site. Trust the action. Trust the effort to paint, draw, and fumble through. Change will come and bring both setbacks and gifts. Neither is permanent so there is no reason to fixate on the failures and successes of the moment.