AGAINST THE GRAIN

When I first started Against the Grain, I honestly didn’t know what I was doing.

I had started the painting months earlier, before I really understood what I was doing with paint, before I understood the materials I was working with, and before I understood much about myself either. Then life happened, and I put the paintbrush down. I was sick, and creating became something I simply didn’t have the capacity for.

When I finally started picking it back up, it wasn’t all at once. It was hesitant. I would touch a section, step away, come back to it, change something, leave it alone again. Slowly, over the last few months, I began finding my way back into the painting. In many ways, it became one of my first real pieces after finding my way back to creating.

There is so much of the earth in this painting. Stone, cracks, fractures, texture, layers. I wanted it to feel like something that had been weathered by time. Like the remnants of something after the current has finally passed.

That idea is what Against the Grain means to me.

Sometimes life feels like being pulled against a current you never asked to be in. You fight it, you adapt to it, you learn from it, and eventually the water begins to settle. What remains afterward can look fractured. There are cracks. There are pieces that have been worn down and changed completely.

But there is beauty in what remains.

The gold flecks throughout the painting were intentional. Even after everything, light still finds a way through. There can be beauty inside the fractures. There can be something valuable left behind by the very things that tried to break you.

I used to think large canvases intimidated me. I’ve realized now that they didn’t intimidate me because they were too big. I just had a lot of growing to do inside of them.

Against the Grain became part of that growth.

It is a painting about what is left behind after the hard season, but also about what those seasons build within us. The foundation underneath may be cracked and weathered, but it can still be strong. Sometimes even stronger because of what it has endured.

And maybe that is the part of this painting that feels most personal to me. Going against the grain doesn’t always mean winning the fight against the current. Sometimes it means making it through, letting the water settle, and learning to recognize the beauty in everything that remains.