I love being an artist. Sometimes, it can be difficult and feel like you are slogging through the mud; everything feels wrong. But then you create these little jewels. It has been a long start to the New Year. I lost my favourite father-in-law. I miss him. I miss our relationship, which was separate from him being my husband’s father. Perhaps that has knocked me off center a bit, or it is just a phase I am going through. I decided to go back to paper. Something I remembered that I enjoyed painting on but don’t because of the difficulty of framing, glass, and all of that fussy stuff. And so I started. Pushed some paint around. I purposefully played with some cooler colours, blue and green, wandering through my colour pots randomly. It was brutal. I so wish I could share this stage, but I forgot to take a picture, or perhaps I was more disgusted with myself and didn’t. Then, yesterday, with my standing, paint with a friend date, I decided to honour what I had started and not discard it. To lean into the things that I love about creating. The problem solving. To answer a painting’s question, the big question of, Who Are You? The immense pleasure of putting that one thing on, like a magic wand tap and the whole piece comes to life. You never know when it will happen or what it might be, but you know because you get that buzz of excitement as the painting says, “Here I am.” And so I grabbed a warm red, for no other reason than that it was very different from the cool background, and did some Miriam marks. And there it was. With a little more, this and that’s “Where Love Blooms” was born.