An urge to create woke me up in the middle of the night.
Gazing at the canvas, the accidental shrine on the shelf next to my easel popped into my peripheral vision: my painting buddy’s pallet next to messy, half-used tubes of paint, and the unfinished painting of a copper teapot sitting on a blueish grey tabletop. Or floating in the sea, as her daughters had said, tiny hands pressed over their lips as they tried to hide the giggles at our clumsy attempts.
The painting was the product of a shared how-to-create-perspective lesson from an old-school, printed book. Neither of us could claim that we were Claude Monet reincarnated. We’d get together for a few hours at a time, sharing space and finding perspective. Between us we had survived sexual abuse, physical abuse, miscarriages, post partem depression, a hysterectomy, racism, a failed attempt at death by suicide, botched surgeries (hers resulting in a tracheotomy), partners’ affairs, failed marriages, sexual harassment, burnout, economic abuse, and rape.
The extraordinary love that flowed from learning about and sharing the painting process, and our random thoughts and deeply personal stories, gobbled up our time together in a frenzy, and we invariably ran out of time on our ‘artsy days’ (her words). The day of the teapot lesson was the last time we painted together before a pulmonary embolism took her away.
This morning, the empty white canvas floated before my hazy eyes, as it has done many times in the last nine months. But the memory of our friendship is not of desolation. It is a fiery turning point for all the women who feel they are not enough, who give more than they have. It is the strength not to stay, the means to walk away, the power to change things for ourselves, and for others. I want her memory to be trusting in what is good and trusting in my Self. More than just painting, we were healing the wounds and the pain that came with being women. She did not survive, but I am still here to honour her. And the others.
© Leonie Vorster 2024
