On setting down our defenses and discovering that openness may be a different kind of strength.
Dear Friends,
“It’s scary to go back to a place where you hurt so badly and felt so small.
You think you’re going to become the same person again.”
I read that recently, and it stayed with me.
Because the studio can be that place.
I am seventy years old now. I have been an artist, in one form or another, since I was eight.
And yet, there were long stretches when I could not walk into my studio.
Not because I didn’t care—but because I cared too much in the wrong way.
The voice was always there:
“You are not good enough.”
So, I did what many of us do.
I studied. I learned from the best. I trained my eye. I learned how to make a painting work—how to make it beautiful.
And for a time, that was enough.
But it wasn’t my voice. It was control, repetition, safety.
Then I stopped painting altogether.
I discovered I had lung cancer.
That knowledge takes something from you. It sharpens your awareness—of fragility, of time, of what cannot be controlled.
After that, I turned to something else entirely. I built a garden—large, consuming, alive. It fed my family, my friends, even local charities.
It gave me purpose. But it also gave me a place to hide.
What I didn’t say out loud was how much it cost me not to paint—
how something in me slowly went quiet, and I learned to live around that silence.
Eventually, I saw that clearly.
The garden, the activism, the full days—they could always stand in for the thing I was avoiding: the studio, the risk of not knowing, the risk of failing without the protection of technique.
So I left that life. Not because it wasn’t meaningful—but because I knew I would never return to my work if I stayed.
Now I am here.
Waiting for my new studio to be built—where the light will be clear, steady, and true.
And something is different.
I am not afraid. Or maybe more honestly, the fear is no longer in charge.
What has changed is not my skill.
If anything, my reliance on control and repetition has weakened. What once came easily does not come the same way now.
For a long time, I thought that meant something was lost.
Now I see it differently. Something has been removed—the armor.
What remains is quieter, less certain, but more honest.
I don’t know exactly what will happen when I step into that space again.
But I do know this:
I will paint for myself. From my heart. And whatever emerges will have a life of its own.
Not because it is perfect—but because it is true.
I used to believe that art was something we mastered. Now I think it may be something we allow. A fragile kind of magic. Not unlike love.
Perhaps that is all we really have—that we create, we notice, we care for what is in front of us.
A small act of refusal against disappearing.
As Vincent van Gogh once wrote,
“The best way to know God is to love many things.”
I am beginning again.
Not as who I was—
but as someone who no longer needs to be protected from the work.
At the edge of light,
~ Melanie