I started this painting in the spring of 2023. That was about two years after my brother died, in February of 2021. I was still very much in the thick of grief and struggling with my mental health. At the time, I was painting constantly, exploring new mediums, learning, and trying to reconnect with my creativity. I had been practicing oil painting digitally in programs that simulated live paint, drying times and all. Eventually, I felt a pull to push myself further.

I’ve always gravitated toward smaller formats, drawing, 8×12″ watercolor pieces, safe little corners of expression. Looking back, I wonder how much of that came from a fear of taking up space.

So, when I walked into the art store and bought a 4’ x 3’ canvas, it felt like a leap. Like a part of me daring to take up space. This was the largest canvas I’d ever worked on. I was terrified of messing it up. Scared of trying something difficult and not being able to make it into something meaningful. I was also excited by the challenge.

Truthfully, I’ve left far more canvases unfinished than I’ve completed. Just knowing myself, my neurodivergent brain, the risk of not finishing was very real. But I still wanted to try.

What I didn’t expect, was that this painting would take over two years to complete. Or that it would quietly sit in the corner of my studio while I lived, changed, unraveled, and re-formed. It bore witness to both my hardest moments and my most joyful, most creative ones.

Sometimes it sat untouched for months, waiting for me to find the right cocktail of time, calm, and creative energy. And each time I returned to it, it felt like coming home. I think, towards the end of my work on it, there was a kind of bitter sweetness. Like a book you’ve curled up to, wept with, laughed with, now ending.

I think part of that grief is in knowing what it took to get there, and letting that go. Finishing something like this, something big and ambitious, maybe even beyond my skill at the time, took hard work. Art can be work. But it is also, love.

There is incredible bravery in making art. It’s a kind of vulnerability that becomes public. To paint is to offer yourself on a canvas, and then to let others see it.

The Journey

In the two years I worked on this piece, I made lots of other art. I also began grad school in January 2024, about eight months after starting the painting. I was still processing my own trauma, but I had come to a place where I wanted to start something new. Something that fit the person I was becoming. Much like this painting, I was reaching toward something larger than myself, something I wasn’t sure I could pull off, but I wanted to try.

This painting was with me through much of that journey. If you look at the progress photos, you’ll see it changed too. The central figure shifted, morphed, then erased, then returned. Painting human form is a challenge, but the deeper challenge was deciding whether to center her at all. I didn’t want her to dominate the composition. I wanted her to feel nestled, almost hidden in the clouds. But the final version doesn’t hide her. She’s bold. Visible, even amidst the vastness of the whale and the sky. I don’t know if that was intentional, but it’s how it ended up, likely a kind of self-reflection.

People often ask about the symbolism of this painting, and honestly, it’s hard to explain. This piece came more from feeling than from intentional meaning. However, when I thought about it, there is symbolism in the humpback whale, these larger-than-life, solitary, mythic beings. It feels like they hold some deep wisdom humans may have forgotten. I have always admired them.

Then there’s the split environment, half ocean, half space. I view these as a mirror of one another. Both are vast, unknowable, full of beauty and mystery we don’t fully understand. Floating between them are two figures, reflecting one another, perhaps, spirit and body. Self and self. They’re both suspended, weightless.

In a way, that’s what dissociation feels like, both disorienting and protective. Dissociation is familiar to me, but there’s another feeling I often fall into, called flow. It’s like being lost but safe at the same time. In both states, reality feels blurred. The edges become soft. That’s the feeling I was capturing, more than a particular story being told.

When I felt I was about halfway finished with this painting, I shared it with a fellow artist. She looked at it and told me the painting felt sad. I smiled, but I was a little surprised. There is sadness in me, deep and complicated, but I wasn’t sad while painting it. I also was hoping that emotion didn’t bleed through perhaps as much as it did. But I was fully present and at peace while painting it. The kind of peace that I chase all the time—a rare, quiet stillness that holds both vastness and comfort.

Wrapping Up

I received advice from a professional artist that if you struggle to finish your work, you should practice finishing it anyway, even if it isn’t perfect. That’s what I chose to do here. Not because everything felt tidy and resolved (in this painting or my life) but because it had come far enough along that it felt whole, even with imperfections. Perhaps even more remarkable because of them.

In the end, this painting holds more than just color and form. I think this painting is a map of becoming. A visual record of change, grief, reaching, and healing.  It carries the weight of time, the softness of hope, and the quiet power of resilience. It’s a kind of love letter, to the parts of me that kept going. The parts that dared to just try.

And in many ways, it reflects more of me than I can even fully perceive. The figure, the whale, the floating sky, they speak to something underneath words. Something that’s still unfolding.

I don’t know what I’ll paint next, but I know I’ll carry this with me. Not just the image, but the process. The patience. The love it took to keep returning to it.

Because that, too, is art.