Magnolias in March, beauty unfolding…

I tell my students never to erase. Mistakes are the seeds of genius. It had been a long winter with heavy late snows, it was dreary and I was creatively weary. I needed to paint, I wanted to paint. The rivers and forests were still shuttered in snow, and I wanted to burst forth into spring; to paint color, life, and beauty! I asked God to give me something beautiful and dramatic. Magnolias! Their simple, yet, sensuous forms are an old favorite of mine. I threw up some lines and started an aqueous background. I never erase; but, I erased and erased, over and over, nothing seemed right, every new ’fix’ and adjustment was more egregious than the fix before. So, I erased, scrubbing off paint with my paper towels, trying something else and scrubbing again, considering… and scrubbing off, layering more on top and repainting into what I had just laid down, over and over, as I became increasingly tense. Finally, I stood back and saw that the buildup of one ‘wrong’ line over another had created a rich beauty of subtly and depth. Our lives are like this- a wrong turn, a wrong choice, pivot, new direction… rework, restore, redeem, as God takes our ‘wrong strokes’ and creates a richness of redemptive experience, beautiful and dramatic!