There’s something magical about crossing the threshold on a creative journey that you can never come back from. This work was my first digital painting with Adobe Fresco, and it came many years after I’d first longed to marry my digital art practice with my analog one. I remember seeing my dear friend and brilliant art educator and painter, Cris Guenter, use an app to paint stunning landscapes with her fingers almost a decade before I tried myself. Though the act intrigued me, it wasn’t until much later that I was pulled into the practice. My first time was born of a period of cleansing that was the culmination of pain I’d been avoiding for far too long. It was an autumn of deaths, and I’d determined that all five parts of my well-being were on fire. My physical health, mental health, my work life, my personal life, and my connections to the world around me through the communities I was a part of. I watched as my life burned before me, and I wasn’t sure of what I’d find if I stopped looking away and start to sift through the ashes.
In a quiet moment of openness, I shared my thoughts on my life with my sister. Half expecting a few words of condolence or sympathy, I was thrown by her firm response, “Well, then fix it.” If anyone else had said the same to me in that moment, I probably would’ve been furious, yelling that if it could’ve been fixed, wouldn’t I have done it already? But something about her clarity and confidence cut through all the darkness and illuminated a path forward for myself. She reminded me that I’d done much harder things in my life before, and hearing her that day set me on a course to reassemble a life that I’d watch fall apart as an outsider and a bystander. It was the warmest invitation to reassemble my life into a new remix, a practice that I’ve always adored and studied across a multitude of modes and contexts. It was time to set off on a new journey to remix my world.
A month later, I sat on a plane next to my husband after a challenging but cathartic escape that was meant to provide us with some much-needed healing amidst the complications of our lives, and I painted this composition with my finger. I mixed the “live paints” in Adobe Fresco with curiosity, watching them comingle and consume each other in the way that watercolors do in real life.
It wasn’t too pretty, but I was feeling my way through the process in ways that felt familiar and new simultaneously. It reminded me of my research on remix – that it exists all around us and flows through us as simply as oxygen in our lungs.
I continued to remix layers and layers of this composition months later, the paints defying reality and staying wet and blendable in ways that are impossible with analog paints. Coming back to the composition each time reminded me that act of disassembly and reassembly of one’s life is a facet of what it means to be human. My composition took many forms before I stopped painting, but not in a way that ever signaled completion. Rather, it was how the Hawaiian’s use their word “pau” – letting something rest and be finished, not because you couldn’t possibly do more, but because you did what needed to be done.
This experience was a reminder of a truth that stays with me wherever I go and in whatever I do – we’re never perfect and we’re never finished, and what a gift that is as we enter into new worlds of discovery, beauty, and light by remixing our thoughts and actions as effortlessly as paints on a canvas 💚