Magnolia
This painting has been marinating in my brain for nine years. Sitting down to actually think about all that it means to me and the roadmap it has traveled, endears my younger self to me. I took a picture of a magnolia tree, in the summer of 2017 right after graduating with my BFA. I was walking around my gorgeous brick laden campus, trying to soak up the most of this season of my life now coming to a close, and knew as soon as I saw the solitary bloom that it would one day be a painting.
A few weeks prior, in the hustle of everyone moving out and packing up their dorms and studios to travel home for the summer, I found the handmade panel canvas, tucked behind a large vertical file bin in the sink room of Peterson House. This building was the sun drenched home of the painting and drawing courses I loved, and the three semi/private studios I was so lucky to score throughout my time in art school. Undoubtedly, the place I spent the most time in my undergraduate career.
I lugged the heavy four foot by three foot panel canvas back to my Resident’s Director apartment on campus, intending to begin painting. August of 2017 was the beginning of a graduate study program for me, and a strange transition time. The majority of my cohort had just graduated and moved away, beginning new jobs or graduate studies of their own. I still had a handful of close friends and a boyfriend living just off campus, and I tried to stay busy with multiple jobs at the university, and my new class load, but it was easy to feel stuck. I was unsure about everything. I was questioning becoming a teacher, questioning the ties that come with being in a serious relationship, and questioning my sanity.
I had dealt with depression all throughout college (actually, had actively not dealt with it), but in the last few semesters it reached a fever pitch. An endless torment of negative self-talk, suicidal ideations, lethargy, disassociation, and weight-gain, pummeled me. One very late night in August when I wasn’t sleeping regularly, I looked at the huge canvas in the corner of my room and got to work. Just a loose outline of leaf shapes and a blue sky background. I wish I could say this painting helped launch me into some productive and happy, clarified path. It didn’t. Most things do not have that power. I didn’t start to feel any kind of clarity for years to come.
Without getting into the gritty details, I quit that graduate program in November after a brief hospitalization. I moved into the basement of a dear friend and mentor and so did Magnolia. We somehow made it through the vampiric life of a basement-dwelling nightshift baker for six months before emerging again into the sun, now with a precious kitten in tow.
My best friend and I found an adorable little townhouse in June of 2018 and had six months of the dream. Two gals in their early twenties, working their asses off at barely above minimum wage jobs that had nothing to do with the degrees we just spent exhaustive hours and dollars working towards. In these years between 2018 and 2021 Magnolia lived under the bed and was almost given away multiple times. These were its dark ages. It observed my first go at playing house with a significant other, my first “real” (read - salaried) job, and a second kitten! A time when it felt right to back burner my personal artistic pursuits and the further development of my skills.
When your bedroom is also your studio…
Seasons come and go and so do the people in your life, though they often leave indelible marks. Magnolia and I made our way to Birmingham, now alone and with just the one cat, in an Alabama snowstorm in January of 2022. Here, the painting lives in the open air - seeing it everyday reminds me that I have made hard choices in the name of being true to myself. As well as being a beautiful metaphor for survival and growth, it acted as a dampener, blocking the tiny door that connected the bathroom plumbing of my apartment and the apartment beneath me. So much noise came through that door, and so much heat was sucked out of it. Magnolia was a trooper. I had a resurgence of energy for painting when I moved into this apartment and was able to ease back into the practice by revisiting unfinished pieces like this one. Folks would see this piece taking up a huge section of the wall in my tiny one bedroom apartment and many of them thought it was finished. They liked the expressive gestural lines and patches of blue. I understand why. The energy release that went into those marks in 2017 were palpable, I was almost afraid to cover them up in favor of something I considered more finished.
In June of 2022, I lost my maternal grandmother. This loss hit me in ways I absolutely would have never been able to guess and really threw off my equilibrium. It was the catalyst for my Topography of Grief body of work, and for me quitting the “real” job in favor of making art full time. The full time of it all still has not fully manifested, but wow, did I hit the ground running with an urgency that I didn’t know I possessed. In the summer of 2024, Magnolia and I moved again, this time to Huntsville. We got a house! With our own whole room for a studio! We could not be stopped! Spurred on by the love and support of a magnificent partner, I was able to commit a significant amount of time to painting.
This is where Magnolia took on its journey to being finished. We got it back up on the easel on September 24th of 2024. A few leaves came together, its eventual style was emerging. We took a few months off to get through the holidays and then on February 10th, 2025, we really got moving. I made an effort to take pictures after each painting session to keep up with where the branches were growing and what leaves began to populate the canvas. It became a ritual to text images of the work in progress to my biggest supporters, the people who saw the naked canvas, and the hasty sketch, and the gaps of space and time. Magnolia got its final brushstrokes by the end of March. And every time I look at it, a different section holds my attention in ways most of my other paintings do not.
Magnolia became a milestone marker for me, a record of a type of faith in myself that often is hard to feel. It has been such a welcome companion on my journey, and has ended up feeling like an accomplishment to be proud of. Here she is:
