From Under Her Stars

An unforgiving truth that I learned before my third birthday is that sometimes life can feel utterly merciless. From a young age, I became familiar with the loneliness of an empty room, the bittersweetness of framed photographs, and the guilt of rediscovering happiness.

In that same year at two years old, my father left my mother and me, but even then I knew the difference between chosen absence and fateful loss.

It was soon after that I learned how to draw. Or maybe it was before, I could never be sure. The timelines of my first few years are life are blurred, not just for the phenomenon of childhood amnesia, but because my life began during the Shakespearean tragedy of my family's lifetime. Michelle died.

There are thoughts, mantras, that carry us through each day. For me, mine is Michelle. She was an actress, a sufferer of substance abuse, and my aunt. Not a day goes by that I am not reminded of her in the mischievous smirks of children, in the vibrancy of an electric-blue sky, or in the mystic-ness of butterflies. Though at two years old I could not quite capture the devastating events unfolding around me, I have been marked by that day's tragedy for every single day that followed. I can only hold onto fragments of stories, events, achievements, and reflections of Michelle’s past through the surrounding faces of tremendous hurt. I delicately walk the line between overstepping and indulging in her through my carefully crafted questions that are almost always preceded with a brief and thoughtful hesitation.

I have a dream-like memory of the day we came home without Michelle. It was probably an imagined memory, but somehow it still feels worthy of validity. I could see my mother angrily painting a painting that she did not keep. I now paint in ode to that painting—that lost painting connected to Michelle. From my earlier years of self-teaching as an artist, I still have areas of growth to fill. At nineteen, I have grown into the true meaning that one can derive in their own work, and others. I have begun my journey of absorbing the love and the heart-wrenching sadness of the world and to channel my own passionate, love-driven grief into my work.

I learnt that happiness refuses to be permanently held, rather, it demands rediscovery. Happiness will ebb and flow like the soft and gently foaming waves of the ocean. Eventually, my daily grief found a new bandaid, genesis: origin, creation, or a mode thereof. Purple, green, and a creamy-soft amber. These are the colours that my fingers know best. I borrow these undertones from the bruises of tragedy’s past to paint the skies that are birthed from my redeemed fingertips. My genesis was paint.

It is said that a picture speaks a thousand words. There are times that I feel like my heart and my hands know something that I cannot fully sense, creating a painting that speaks another language. These foreign, yet innate messages that come from within me encourage me to pause, and look into the window of my soul. It is through this window that I find myself looking for traces of Michelle. These are the words that spoke before me, shown in my painting, From Under Her Stars. Using hand-made canvas board, and canvas paper, I hand-crafted a window from one physicality to another—layering panes of painted glass that connect Michelle’s essence to that of my own. I wanted to emphasize the separation that exists between us and our lost loved ones by creating two distinct pieces and collaging them together—illustrating a sense of effort, of intention, of two worlds that choose to align against their barriers. Here’s to all of us who make that same effort to choose love over barriers.