Painting Neve, 2.0
Embracing uncertainty, nudged by water
Predictably, the moment I shared my writing about painting Neve, more thoughts thrust themselves upon me, eager for the limelight. Perhaps I should have called today’s piece Painting Neve, the sequel. But for currently cryptic reasons, this is Painting Neve, 2.0. Credit for this naming system goes to one of Neve’s favourite nurses at the hospice. A story for another day.
Control. Precision.
Here. Now.
Without wishing to sound overly dramatic, art is reshaping my brain. It is the source of what I can only describe as a paradigm shift within me. Drawing and painting is affecting how I feel and think and act. Moreover, how I feel and think and act shapes my drawing and painting.
What’s more, art is also altering my relationship with control, with acceptance of my lack of control. I am learning to hold space for this, to tolerate the unease and uncertainty and even to embrace this uncertainty. With this learning comes a cradling of the present, the here and the now.
Coming to watercolours as an adult, I have been shocked to discover how little control I have. This mix of pigments, honey and gum arabic, suspended in water, challenges my perfectionist tendencies, my urge for precision and order. They have no tolerance for perfection. They are forcing me to sit with good enough.
As a teenager, keen for perfection, I imagined a way of doing art and I designed myself a box. It took me over two decades to realise that I didn’t need to fit myself into this box, that art is so much wider than my initial perceptions.
This change in my relationship with perfection began with painting flowers; they were surprisingly forgiving. I began to let go of my idea of one way of painting things, of art as a binary act. Flowers could be loose and relaxed, they could be botanical illustrations and they could be anything I wanted them to be. This learning, combined with the grief that was percolating and embedding within me as I cared for Neve, was the beginning of a lesson in good enough.
Granted, there are techniques to learn, to influence the path of the water and the paint. However, watercolours have a mind of their own. No two paintings are exactly alike. It is hard, if not impossible, to cover up mistakes, to paint over mishaps. Early on, I realised that either I would need another medium or I would need to let go, to accept and to embrace the imperfections and unpredictability of watercolours.
In time, painting flowers began to gently nudge me again. No longer merely accepting of the nature of good enough, of flaws and all, I began to see the attraction of ceding control, of surrendering. The flow of water, sometimes gently pigmented, other times heavily, was my teacher, my guide.
For somebody with a perfectionist nature, this has been a startling experience. Fighting against the unpredictable nature of watercolours, in order to get it just right, was leading to frustration. I would sit there, imbued with regret, wishing I had stopped earlier. Why had I not accepted the ebb and the flow of the water. Why had I not just let go and observed? In time, I began to curate, to work with the unpredictability, to gently nudge, to harness the beauty of water and colour. This was when I began to see the quiet power within watercolours.
It must be said, however, that good enough flowers were one thing. I could accept them as they were, flaws and otherwise. Portraits are not flowers. An embrace of uncertainty does not yet fully saturate my sketching and painting of Neve.
Is a painting of Neve, without the likeness of Neve, really a painting of Neve?
This is an ongoing journey. Much as I wish otherwise, I am not a reformed perfectionist, able to embrace the chaos of life. No, that would be too easy. Possibly before cancer entered our life, I might have assumed that losing a child would fix all my personality challenges. Surely I would be in the moment, patient, noticing the joy, now that I understood that life is precious and precarious? As will surprise almost nobody who has experienced grief and trauma, this is not my reality. Life continues, possibly with even less patience. I am tired.
Painting, alongside grief, has taught me to gently embrace the unpredictable, to set the scene and then to let go. As is so often the way, I am reminded of birth and of death. Is watercolour painting not akin to creating a birth plan or an advanced care plan? We think we have sovereignty. Ultimately, however, our control is limited. Birth and death, like watercolours, reside outside the realms of command. The more I understand about painting, the better I can plan and organise and paint. However, I can’t control what happens next, as I watch the water move and soak in, as I see the paints swirling together and mixing and settling, as they desire. I surrender, to the watery pigments, to the bodily processes of birth and of death.
I am reminded of this surrendering, when I think more specifically about painting Neve, my dead child.
Painting her now is the closest I can get to a continuation of her life and her liveliness. I know she is dead but when the likeness is there, she comes to life in front of me. And yet, I am constantly reminded that even this likeness is not enough, won’t be and can’t be enough. Time and again, I come across the guidance, the instructions, that it is better to draw and paint a person from real life, rather than from photographs. That two dimensional photographs can’t give the same nuance as reality.
Inside, I rail against this. How can I accept that my paintings of Neve will never be as good as they could be? Those who utter this guidance, I wonder, have they ever buried the person they now wish to sketch, to paint, to bring back to life?
Whilst I accept that there may be an objective truth to this guidance, it still stings and aches. Is it their words that sadden me or is it my reality that devastates me?
I will never paint this child from life. Never.
A secondary loss, an immutable consequence of death, sorrow on top of sorrow.
I have photos and videos, plenty of them. But try as I might, I cannot conjure Neve in front of me, her rounded self, her warmth, her liveliness, her depth. I must surrender to the reality that she will never again be alive. And so, I will only paint her from pictures and photographs. A rendering of a previously three dimensional child, now only available to me in two dimensions. What depth will I miss, which aspects of her will remain obscure and enigmatic, forever more?
And so, to my collection of photos, of surface representations, I go. I have a large supply of photographs; Neve’s 3,816 days were well documented by numerous family members. Somehow though, even with this extensive collection, I can’t always find what I am looking for. Should I have taken more pictures? What if I had known that I would want to paint her? Would this knowledge have allowed me to capture all of her, her multitude of faces, of angles and looks?
As might be imagined, the world of anticipatory grief is heavy with suggestions of making memories, of taking every single picture, of documenting it all. It’s not hard to see why; eventually, after death, these photographs will be one of the few things that are left.
And yet. Even when Neve was still alive, these suggestions troubled me. I say this as somebody who will never take another new picture of her child, who already spots gaps in the collection. What would this added pressure, of fully documenting my child’s life and personality, have done to our time together?
We took plenty of pictures, let’s be clear. However, we did not document every single moment. Mostly this was unconscious but sometimes it was a deliberate choice. A camera would have altered the dynamics of the moment. I say camera but really, it would have been a phone. It was already all too easy to be distracted by my phone; there was an element of peace and tranquility when it was not within reach or sight. This meant that a camera was not always there.
To have tried to preempt my future self by curating a collection of pictures from which to paint would have obstructed our attempts to live in the moment, the here and now. There would have been a phone between my child and I, in addition to the ticking clock, with presumably ever increasing frustrations and worry.
The reality is, there would never have been enough pictures or the right pictures. I dread to think what Neve’s final weeks and days would have been like, had I been searching for this, intent on taking more and more pictures. Would I have constantly been seeing her through a screen, behind a lens, rather than in person? And what of her view of me, behind a phone, as her life was drawing to a close? Sometimes there is regret, yes, but often there is relief that I didn’t know that I would paint Neve one day.
I have to accept that there are looks, moments, angles which were real but which will never be immortalised in pigment, on paper. This is the price I pay for being with my child, of noticing the softness and warmth of her hands, the tears on her face, the sound of her giggle, the smell of a Freddo, the taste of our life together.
I so loved hearing about your painting. Such a beautiful painting.
That final painting. The eye lashes and brows. So beautiful 😍