Artful Deconstruction

Painting by Eric Wieringa

My original dream wasn’t to be a fine artist. I wanted to be an illustrator. I wanted to tell stories visually, build worlds, and create images that carried narrative weight. Illustration felt like a way to make art both practical and poetic, expressive and useful. I wanted the work to mean something and, perhaps, I needed to know exactly what it meant.

But breaking into that world was difficult. The work was inconsistent, the doors were narrow, and the longer I pushed, the further I drifted from the thing that had drawn me there in the first place:

the simple act of making art.

Eventually, I accepted a position as a professor teaching foundational courses in art and design. The work was both gratifying and exhausting. There was something deeply honorable about guiding young artists through their formative years, helping them learn to see, trust their instincts, and remain present when the work felt confusing or uncertain.

But teaching demanded more of me than I realized.

I tried too hard to create meaningful experiences rather than simply hold space for them. I became attached to outcomes: whether my students “got it,” whether my instruction made a visible difference, whether I could see evidence of my influence.

I couldn’t fully enjoy the work unless I could measure its impact.

That same need had followed me from illustration into teaching. Just as art needed to communicate something, teaching needed to accomplish something. My life needed to produce some visible evidence that it mattered.

I was a good teacher because I shared my life as an artist with my students. But the professional demands of teaching, combined with my own expectations, gradually pulled me away from my own art practice.

Slowly, I started losing myself.

Around that time, my wife and I lost a child late in her pregnancy. The grief was quiet but total, the kind that settles into the body and changes how you move through the world.

At the same time, cultural upheaval was forcing me to confront injustice, suffering, and my own place and privilege within systems I had rarely questioned. Personal loss layered over collective grief began dismantling the explanations I had once trusted.

All of it arrived at once. Questions I didn’t yet have language for piled up alongside sorrow I couldn’t escape. The world felt both unbearably intimate and impossibly large, and I didn’t know how to sit still inside any of it.

So I did what any good Midwestern boy is taught to do.

I worked harder.

I threw myself into teaching and the familiar comfort of productivity. If I stayed busy enough, perhaps the ache wouldn’t catch up with me.

The following semester, just as I was doubling down, we received the news that the college was closing.

I was still young then. I hadn’t yet learned how quickly the ground beneath you can give way, or how easily life can undo your careful plans. I hadn’t felt the full sting of loss, the kind that doesn’t ask if you’re ready and doesn’t leave simply because you remain strong.

What followed wasn’t only grief. It was an existential crisis, a dark night of the soul that stripped away my illusions of control, stability, and certainty.

The structures I had relied upon (identity, vocation, faith) began to collapse all at once. And with them went the sense of meaning I thought I understood.

Facing the Darkness

At the time, my studio occupied the upper floor of an old industrial warehorse in St. Louis. It was a strange, unassuming building that felt more like a dream than a workplace. The space was filled with sagging couches, old mannequins, discarded objects, and the kind of visual clutter only artists seem able to tolerate.

A few other artists worked there, but most days I was alone.

It was quiet.

Cavernous.

A little haunted.

In hindsight, the space mirrored something happening inside me.

I relocated my family to Michigan while I remained in St. Louis to finish my contract, sell our house, and look for new employment. During that time, I helped develop a new art program that eventually became accredited.

On paper, it was a success. When the time came to accept a permanent position, it looked like stability, security, and the responsible choice.

I turned it down.

To any sane person, the decision might have looked reckless. I had a family waiting for me. I had obligations. I had every reason to say yes and return to a life that appeared stable.

But the void in my life could no longer be ignored. I couldn’t return home unwhole.

Somewhere along the way, I had forgotten how to be human. I was beyond burnout, past exhaustion, past motivation, past the point where rest alone could restore me.

I felt hollow.

And I knew, with a clarity that did not come from logic, that if I didn’t stop, something essential in me would be lost for good.

I had to face what I had been avoiding.

I had to stop working long enough to feel what my job had helped me escape.

I had to find a way forward.

My wife was my greatest support during that time. She trusted the process even when I couldn’t explain it. In the midst of her own grief, perhaps because of it, she understood that survival doesn’t always look responsible from the outside.

She didn’t want the version of me that could merely function or endure. She wanted the part of me that was still alive.

She knew I would've come home if she asked, but also that I would return a ghost, a version of myself that wasn't able to face the darkness.

So I sold the house, moved into my studio, and began to paint again.

The Unmaking

What made that season especially disorienting wasn’t only the loss of a child, a job, or even my sense of self. It was the loss of definitions. The big ones. The kind that hold everything else in place.

Words and frameworks I had relied upon for years began to loosen their grip. Certainties I hadn’t known I was standing on gave way beneath me.

Things like purpose.

Faith.

God.

The sense of God I carried in my head, the one I could name, explain, and defend, disappeared.

And when it did, I panicked.

Prayer felt dishonest and empty, so I tried to rebuild what had collapsed through understanding. I immersed myself in new ideas, searching for a different explanation, a better argument, another belief strong enough to hold.

But the life I was living had outgrown my explanations.

I found myself caught between what I could no longer return to and the abyss of unknowing in front of me.

Losing those definitions also changed my relationships. Friendships I thought were solid quietly dissolved, revealing how much of our connection had depended on a shared language of certainty. Some voices faded without explanation. Others welcomed my questions while still clinging to the conclusions they believed I was meant to reach.

My choice to step into solitude, to sleep on sagging armchairs, and bathe in the slop sink over coming home, made little sense to those around me. From the outside, it looked like avoidance. But I wasn’t trying to escape my life. I was trying to remain close to the one place where I could still feel it.

Everything had to be taken apart.

Deconstructed.

Examined.

There is nothing romantic about deconstruction. It is hard, disorienting, and deeply unsettling, which may be why pastors and religious leaders so often warn against it. It is easier to caution against the risk than to sit with the uncertainty it exposes. For those whose sense of security is bound tightly to a particular framework of faith, the unraveling can feel like a threat not only to meaning, but to belonging, love, and even eternity itself.

It takes courage to question what your group considers unquestionable. It takes courage to follow the truth of your experience when you know it may carry you beyond the boundaries of your tribe. Changing your mind can cost you the comfort of community and sometimes the acceptance of people you love.

But sometimes, deconstruction is not a rejection of faith. It is a refusal to pretend that an old framework can still carry the weight of our lived experience.

What I could not see then was that the unraveling was not separate from my becoming. The unmaking was part of the making. The fall was not the opposite of growth, but the descent through which deeper roots could form.

That darkness requires a different kind of trust.

Where do you go when you feel alone, forsaken by the very presence you were told would never leave?

What I eventually learned was that the felt absence of God offten precedes a different kind of presence, not one we can easily explain or defend, but one we can finally inhabit.

Before I could recognize that presence, however, I needed something to sustain me. Something that didn’t ask me to justify my existence or turn my pain into a coherent explanation.

Something to keep me afloat in an ocean of nothing.

Painting the Path

The investigative work of trying to think my way through that dark night mattered. We need new information when old assumptions fail. Questioning, examining, and comparing are necessary movements of the mind.

But the mind is a limited instrument when what we’re seeking lies beyond what it can conceive.

The void can be an invitation for those willing to enter it, but the void itself is not salvation. Its work is not to resolve, but to widen; to draw us into greater complexity rather than deliver us from it. Some things must fall apart before they can be remade. Some certainties must darken before we can recognize a light that does not depend upon them.

Critical thinking could lead me deeper into the mystery, but it could not carry me through.

I didn’t need another theory.

I needed to paint the path forward.

Painting took on a different role then. It became a kind of life preserver.

When meaning falls away, instinct takes over. The things that keep us alive rise to the surface, not always because we choose them, but because they choose us.

I’m not talking about numbing agents or distractions. I’m talking about the pull toward whatever still feels real.

All I could do was show up and paint.

Not to express myself.

Not to explain anything.

Not to tell a story.

But to survive.

So I stopped trying to make work about something.

For someone who had always wanted art to carry a story, this felt almost like surrender. But I was beginning to discover that art did not always need to carry a message.

Sometimes its purpose was to carry the person making it.

I began painting whatever was nearby, whatever had endured.

A stubby pencil.

A rusted tool.

An old bottle cap.

Objects worn by use. Things that carried the marks of time. Things that didn’t pretend to be more than they were.

I would place one on the table, light it, and spend a few hours painting. When I finished, I would post the painting online and move on to the next one.

I started calling them daily paintings.

No pretense.

No message.

No agenda.

Just the simple joy of making something with my hands.

There was something deeply honest about that work. The process mattered more than the outcome. The act of attention mattered more than the finished piece.

Before long, the paintings began to accumulate, small, humble witnesses to the fact that I was still here.

When life becomes thin, everything unnecessary falls away. What remains is raw, exposed, and real. And somehow, that thinness reads as authentic.

What I didn’t understand at the time was that the work itself had become a kind of prayer.

Not a petition.

Not a conversation with God.

It was an act of presence, attention offered without a plan, a willingness to remain when words had run out.

Painting didn’t resolve my questions. It didn’t restore my old beliefs or return the definitions I had lost. But it placed me back into relationship with the moment, with the ordinary world in front of me, and with what remained alive within me when nothing else felt certain.

Within that relationship, something essential began to heal.

I wasn’t praying to the God “out there”or to the God constructed inside my head.

I was praying to the living presence within all things.

Slowly, almost imperceptibly, the weight began to lift. Not because answers arrived, but because I was no longer alone in the dark.

For You, The Artist

If you’re reading this as an artist, or as someone whose inner light feels dim, fractured, or uncertain, I want to speak to you as I would to a student or a companion on the path.

You are not broken because your work feels empty.

You are not faithless because belief no longer feels solid.

And you are not behind because you don’t know what comes next.

There are seasons when creativity is not about finding your voice or making something meaningful. There are seasons when the work becomes a practice of staying present and learning how to listen again.

In those moments, art is not an achievement.

It is a devotion.

The invitation is simple and demanding at the same time:

Show up.

Show up to what is in front of you.

Show up without explanation or agenda.

Show up before clarity arrives.

You don’t need a concept.

You don’t need a message.

You don’t need to resolve anything.

The work itself can become a kind of prayer, not something you say, but a posture of attention. A way of listening into the vast darkness of unknowing. A willingness to remain open, to receive, and to become present to your life again.

This is how the path reveals itself: not all at once, but step by step, stroke by stroke.

And as you remain with the work, something begins to reach back. Not necessarily an answer, but a presence. Something that allows the old life to fall away so another can begin.

Perhaps this is what transformation asks of us: the courage to question, the willingness to be unmade, and the trust to keep moving before we know what we are becoming.

The unmaking is part of the making. The falling is part of the growth. And light does not defeat the darkness by avoiding it. It shines from within it.

Your job is simple:

Pick up your brush.

Sit with the absence.

Trust what is being made in the dark.

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If you’re struggling to find your way back to your art (or to yourself) you don’t have to walk the path alone. The Painted Path mentoring program offers guidance, encouragement, and a supportive space to help you take the next step.

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