The Seeds She Watered Print

This was my second painting. I started during the pandemic and have been in love with the practice ever since. I used to be a poet and struggled immensely with self criticism, tearing up my works on the page before they could see the light of day. But when, I started painting, I was able to freely express on the canvas, or in this case the cardboard. When I first started painting, I did not have the spare budget for canvas. This piece was for my mother. I had been reading some buddhist works at the time. The buddhist scholar I was reading described that in our life, we plant many seeds, but which we grow in the gardens of our soul depends on which ones we water and nourish. I wanted to share this vision and message with my mother, who was going through a hard time and some illnesses. I painted this with only 3 brushes and struggled immensely with the texture I wanted. The trees veins breathe off the cardboard, etched with an angled brush no wider than a fingernail. The roots reflect the work we don't see and how the things we nourish are often even richer and more vast than we can see. The leaves shimmer with copper and lime green, the rust of time and weathering of our thoughts as new ones come to take their place. My mother and I got into and argument over this painting ; she had cut it to fit it into a frame, which I felt missed the point. My mother has since passed, but I treasure how much she loved this painting and I always smile seeing it. She helped plant and nourish so many seeds in my spirit and we shared buddhist texts until her dying day. A philosophical quest until the end.