You Are Loved – checkered

Description

This piece hardly resembles what I planned and envisioned, but I wouldn’t have it any other way. If you watch the video, my process does not make sense. I start with a shaped scraper, and it has a negative effect. I then added more paint and tried something else… yep, it didn’t work out again. Being someone who struggles with self-doubt, I was getting more and more frustrated with it. It wasn’t turning out how I wanted, and I had put a lot of time and money into getting to this point, only for it to fail. I started to see some aspects of the colors turned out to my liking, so I added a little more paint to get it to a state where I felt it would turn into a good piece. I started peeling the custom stencil, and things went bad again. Some pieces ripped and smeared the finish. I stared at it, trying to think how I could save it now that the stencil was gone. I tried smoothing and blending the section, but it still didn’t match. I thought the piece was a failure, so I figured I would use a differently shaped scraper to just get rid of everything. I did one pass, and I noticed something that I liked. I was hesitant, but I had gone too far already. I did the 2nd and last pass on the piece, this time putting in a lot of pressure because I knew I would only get one shot at this. The final piece showed itself. I know it is not everyone’s liking, and that’s ok.

I love how this turned out and the process that went into it. It makes it more meaningful for me because this phrase, “You are Loved,” has a lot of worth for me and others. We go through so many variations in our own life and things rarely turn out like we planned. Sometimes, we give more in an effort to make things work. Other times, we take away parts of ourselves that we are not contributing. After we finally think we are somewhere good, something seemingly small breaks and ruins it. Then, through frustration, pain, and even after giving up, we see something that makes us stop and think, “Wow, that was under there the whole time?” Because I added so much paint during this process, it cracked a lot more than usual when I work with the thick medium. I like it even more because of the cracks.

This piece is 24″w x 16″h. It comes with mounting material and will look good in a variety of styles and rooms. With these Super Jot art pieces that have writing on them, I like to get a voice recording and attach it to the piece in the form of a QR code. The “You Are Loved” piece I have that I made with my kids has a voice recording of me. You can listen to that here if you want to get an idea. Who would you tell, “you are loved” to?