I read an article this week written by a Duke Divinity professor titled, “This year Easter will feel more like Passover”. A brief summary states, "This year the Exodus story will mirror the experience of millions across the globe who are staying inside their homes, praying that death will pass them by and that God will once more provide deliverance."
Every year, the season of my greatest surge in creativity is Lent. For my friends who aren’t familiar with the Lenten season, Lent is the 40 day season in the Christian calendar between Mardi Gras (Fat Tuesday or Shrove Tuesday) and Palm Sunday (the Sunday before Easter and the beginning of Holy Week), beginning with Ash Wednesday. The climax of Holy Week rises on Maundy Thursday where Christian’s remember Jesus’ Last Supper by celebrating the Eucharist (Holy Communion) and practicing foot washings (in some traditions), experience the communal grief of Jesus’ crucifixion on Good Friday, live in the silence of Holy Saturday, and revel in the festivities of Easter Sunday, the traditional day of Jesus’ Resurrection. For centuries, Christians all over the world have commemorated this season as a time to dig deeper into the earthly life of Jesus, practice fasting, and engage in personal reflection and spiritual renewal.
In the rhythm of the past few years, the few weeks before Easter has been the time in which my creativity and artistic production are on hyperdrive as a part-time working artist. My Instagram page is usually filled with teasers for a new project while requests for purchasing, commissioning, or exhibiting my art falls unexpectedly into my inbox. April is the month where Jesus’ journey towards death during Lent tends to meet the hope of the resurrection at Easter. April is also the month in which I am reminded of my own, real-life journey towards death back in 2016 while watching my mother succumb to illness, fading slowly and gently into eternity. Since then, the Christian pilgrimage towards Lent and my own personal grief have coincided and collided all too perfectly, almost like a dreaded dance that is met with applause at the end.
The first painting I completed after my mother’s passing I hastily threw away in the dumpster of our 6th Avenue apartment building in Miami where we lived. I felt that it was ugly, that no one would like it, and no one would ever purchase or hang such a thing in their home. I have no idea why that assessment even crossed my mind since I had no intention of selling it at all.
The night before my mother passed, while she slept, I dipped her fingers in red acrylic paint and smeared it across a canvas in the makeshift studio I created out of her hospice room. In the days following her passing, I assemble some of her jewelry and glued them to that red-painted canvas in various intricate ways. It was comedically the most horrifying and chaotic-looking piece I’d ever created.
It took several weeks after I threw it away before I felt any regret for what I had done. I realized that sometimes what we create is valuable not because it’s pretty or popular or sellable, but because the process of creating it, and who it was created with, is where its value lies. That painting I threw away was the first, last, and only painting I would ever create alongside my mother’s hands. At the age of 25, I learned that grief is irrational and the consequences, oftentimes, irrevocable.
Self portrait holding Grief in Watercolor, 2016.
Since my mother’s death in April 2016, I’ve created A Lenten Study (2017), Cosmic Flood (2018), and Anitha’s Concerto (2019) among other smaller creations. I’ve sold art I never intended to sell and have been invited as an artist into spaces I didn’t network myself to be in. It’s all been a grace from God. I have been blessed as an evolving artist and have seen the power of what honest, creative, artistic expression can become.
This Holy Week, my only art project is simply to exist. To attempt, in an imperfect way, to be and remain alive. I will not create a new painting series. I will not be productive. I will not strive to sell any art until the disease that has kept us in collective seclusion is slowed, the plague is lifted, and we are allowed to be human in open spaces again. I will not be celebrating Easter in quarantine this year. Instead, I will observe an imperfect Passover, pray, and have a quiet dinner with my partner. I will pray for a covering for each of you who have lingered in these words long enough to read this sentence. I will pray for peace for my fellow artists and ministers and for sustenance for those deemed “essential” yet under-resourced during this time of relational famine. I will remember my mom. I will be a human whose worth does not lie in producing pretty, trendy, sell-able things. In fact, I will choose to exist with as little production as possible. I will lay low in my humanity, just as Christ did. If I feel moved to create art in this season, I will create simply because I was created. My project for Lent 2020 is to just be… be in my humanity just as Christ was on the cross.
I leave you with this lovely poem by Amy Lowell (1874-1925) gifted to me in the most timely fashion by my dear friends and fellow artists Louis Holstein and Ashley Holstein:
