Painting Meaning on the Mess

Grief does something strange to time.

April 12, 2023 time stopped for me.

It began like any other night: dinner, homework, and tucking the girls into bed.

And then everything that had been ordinary vanished.

I found my wife, Nicole, on the bedroom floor.

Suddenly there was panic. Crying children. CPR. A phone pressed to my ear. Paramedics moving quickly, with the terrible fervency reserved for moments when time is running out. 

Desperation.

A sheet.

Scilence.

When Nicole died, the world shattered in a single blow that altered how the clock itself seemed to work.

Rooms echoed differently.

Mornings arrived without their former gravity.

Her laughter, so ordinary the week before, suddenly became impossible to summon.

There is a particular cruelty in sudden absence. One day love is a weight you lean into; the next it is a vacuum. The person who steadied your days, mirrored your thoughts, softened your edges, gone.

Not gradually. Not mercifully. Just… gone.

I kept waiting for her voice to show up again in small ways. In the studio. In the kitchen. In my head while I worked.

It didn’t.

And the loss of that steady, encouraging presence, the one who knew my rhythms better than I did, left me untethered in ways I could have never anticipated.

When I finally returned to painting after taking time away that summer, I expected rust.

What I didn’t expect was regression.

I rushed.

I second-guessed decisions I’d been making confidently for decades.

I abandoned paintings halfway through.

I forgot basic things, proportions, patience, how to stay long enough with a problem for something honest to surface.

I felt like a beginner again.

Not because my skills had vanished, but because my life had changed so completely that even familiar gestures no longer landed where they used to.

My hand was steady.

My heart was broken.

Eventually the frustration grew loud enough that I stopped trying to solve it with more paint. Instead, I paused. 

I needed order in the chaos.

So, I started cleaning my studio.

I opened drawers I hadn’t touched in months. Re-stacked panels.

Swept corners where pigment dust had quietly collected.

Sorted through an archaeology of half-finished ideas.

That’s when I came across them.

Large sheets of Bristol paper layered with paint.

I always paint with a sheet of bristol behind my canvas, they are great for absorbing excess turpentine, catching stray strokes and drips from a loaded brush. They begin pristine and end as an anarchy of brushstrokes: ambiguous gestures, smeared color, ghostly tape lines, fingerprints, notes scribbled to myself at the end of long days.

They’re not works of art.

They’re repositories for the marks that didn't make it into the painting.

Normally I would have recycled them.

Instead, I laid them on my studio floor where they sat for days.

Stacks of crusty paper, each one a dense topography of years in the studio. Ultramarine slipping into umber. Titanium white fogging entire corners. Razor-thin lines from a testing mark. Penciled reminders: crop this tangent. push that value. Meeting at 2.

I didn't know why I’d kept them, but, as they lay there in my studio, I couldn't bring myself to throw them away.

There was something about  them.

Something raw.

These sheets weren’t usable. They weren’t curated. They weren’t composed. They were just honest unintended records of time. A visual diary I hadn’t realized I was keeping.

And somehow they felt… truer than most finished paintings.

They reminded me of something art (and life) teaches again and again: that meaning often hides in what we overlook.

Across spiritual traditions and creative practices alike, we’re invited to reconsider what is unexamined. To notice the vitality in what's disregarded. As the psalmist wrote, the stone the builders rejected has become the cornerstone.

The things we once considered insignificant, much like the things we tend to avoid, may hold the salvation we seek.

Standing there looking at those paint-scarred sheets, I realized how much they resembled the last year of my life.

Messy.

Layered.

Unplanned.

Full of marks I never intended to make.

Grief is like that.

It splashes into places you didn’t invite it.

Smears across plans you thought were settled.

Leaves unfinished passages where you meant to build something whole.

Tragedy is not useful.

It does not arrive carrying explanations or meaning or some hidden divine choreography. The familiar platitudes we reach for are often more comforting to the speaker than to the one who is suffering.

Sometimes, reasons do not exist.

There is no lesson waiting to be extracted.

No punishment being administered.

And yet, I wonder…

What if the suffering could be transformed?

What if the discarded brushstrokes, the unexpected losses, and things left incomplete hold the very material from which something new can be made?

Perhaps, if we approach our creative work and our lives, with a mindset that reclaims these neglected marks, we can begin to find meaning in the midst of chaos.

That thought led me to see beauty in those bristol sheets. 

I felt compelled to use them. I measured them, cut them into smaller pieces, and began painting butterflies on top.

Not to make some grand metaphor, just in a desire to move forward.

To find a way back to stability in the timeless plane of grief I existed. Fragile forms floating over visual wreckage. Delicate wings carried by surfaces that once only caught mistakes.

Transformation rarely arrives with a clean plan,

but what we create from the rubble, beyond the frame, on the drop cloth of life, is often where healing begins.

For You, the Artist

If your brush feels like a 10 pound weight.

If grief, confusion or disappointment has crept into your studio.

If you can’t move forward, or don't want to move forward, or keep telling yourself you should just get past this.

Pause.

Look around.

And ask: What scraps have you been stepping over?

We are trained to chase resolution. But some of the most important work begins when we stop trying to escape the mess and instead ask what it might already contain.

You do not have to create a masterpiece when your life is in shambles. 

You cannot create meaning where there is none.

The most courageous thing you can do is paint on top of the meaninglessness.

Let the things that cannot be thrown away sit on your studio floor.

Wonder about what cannot yet be put away.

Listen to the rejected marks and they will tell you how to begin again.

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If grief has stalled your work, or life has scattered everything across the floor, you don’t have to navigate it alone. The Painted Path Mentoring Program is a place to begin again, slowly and honestly, through the practice of art.

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