It’s been 15 months since my dad, out with friends for a normal Sunday cycle, never came home. This can’t be an essay detailing how I’ve overcome my grief — I haven’t. This also won’t be an essay that helps make sense of the senselessness of losing someone decades before they should have gone. It still makes no sense to me. Instead, I’ll write about art. My dad’s art. And mine, new though it is.
My dad was (the past tense still prompts a little spasm in my fingers, the temptation to hit ‘backspace’ and replace it with ‘is’) a doctor. He had thousands of patients who adored him, but his work was just a single facet of everything he did. He was an astronomer. A kite-surfer. A chess genius. And an artist. One day, my dad picked up a paintbrush and started teaching himself art, using a bit of YouTube and a lot of trial and error.
His work ended up on show in art galleries. He sold prints of his art. Anything was on the table for him: landscapes, historic monuments, people, animals…he dabbled in it all. When I’d come by for a visit, I’d spy his latest work in progress on the dining room table. It never occurred to me to ask him to teach me. I was useless at art and hadn’t held a brush since my junior high teacher told me I had lots of passion but little ability.
Something shifted, and I wanted to create art, too
The desire to learn about art started with hoarding my dad’s paintings. He had a stack of hundreds of them. My mom and I sat together, choosing our favorites to frame in our homes. I chose his painting of Eilean Donan in Scotland and the Colosseum in Rome, two places I loved visiting. I also chose a beachscape with two silhouette figures that reminded me of my dad and me.
I sat and stared at them for months. Each painting was a slice of time from my dad’s life. His hands held each page. His brushstrokes made each mark. His eyes chose each color. I’ve always kept a mental list of the things that need to be snatched from my home if there’s a fire. Dad’s paintings are now top of that list.
Two months ago, I saw an ad for a watercolor painting workshop near me. ‘Beginners Welcome.’ I went alone and spent three hours painting a dahlia. I found another workshop across town a few weeks later and painted a Tuscan house among poppies. I then found a two-day oil painting workshop and went to that, too, enjoying the challenge of a different medium.
My new hobby has helped me feel more connected to my dad
Usually, when I pick up a hobby, I demand immediate excellence or abandon it. Painting is different. I’m learning slowly. I’m using the expertise of others, in person where possible and online when not. I’m making mistakes, but I’m making them holding my dad’s brushes (the salvageable ones — he wasn’t particularly diligent when it came to washing them).
I read that losing a parent is a sense of homesickness that never goes away. It’s the best description of grief that I’ve found. Picking up my dad’s hobby creates a tiny tether to him. It doesn’t remove the homesickness. It doesn’t ease the grief — if anything, it agitates it, swirling it around like cleaning a paintbrush in water.
But sometimes that’s exactly what I want. I want to sit in the grief. I hold his brushes, I listen to his playlist, and I do the thing he loved doing, aware that I’ll never have the privilege of doing it beside him. In doing so, his hand guides mine. Together, we make art.
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