This is a painting I completed during World Watercolor Month:
I don't think it looks like much at first glance. However, it has the most inspiration and meaning behind it than anything else I've painted so far. Here's the story of how this came to be.
The prompt for day 26 was "favorite song." I really wasn't sure how to paint this. I started off trying to paint my impressions of a song, but as someone who considered herself a singer first for multiple decades, trying to convey music via paint was just not working for me. I could not wrap my brain around it.
Then I had an idea. Well, actually it was multiple ideas, but they happened so quickly I'll try to list them in a sensible order. It went like this:
July 26 is my 12 wedding anniversary.
Our first dance song at our wedding was Billy Joel’s “Just the way you are.”
Kintsugi is the Japanese art of repairing things that celebrates the cracks & broken spots.
Love is the art of appreciating someone else just the way they are, flaws & all.
We’ve accidentally broken a lot of dishes in our 12 years of marriage.
Put it all together and what have you got? This painting.
This painting is of one of our dishes (which we’ve had since we got married), with kintsugi repair lines. It represents brokenness and flaws, and a love that doesn't ignore it but embraces it, a love that knows the flaws tell more of the story than a perfect veneer ever could.
(Also, maybe next time we break a dish I should actually use kintsugi to repair it, or I'm gonna be out of bowls soon!)
