Born With a Brush - A Love Hate Realtionship with Art.

 

                                            A Print I did while living in Sendai, Japan.

Born With a Brush

I was born with a brush and palette in my hands, and a blank canvas before me. God said, “Go, paint me a life. Make it as colorful and cheerful as you can, or as dull as hell — your choice.”

By the age of six or seven, I was already painting on sheets of brown paper as tall as myself, six feet by three. With Plaka colors in hand, I painted for Parents’ Day exhibitions at Francis Light Primary School. Those early days were filled with joy — the smell of paint, the sweep of color, and the wonder of creating something bigger than me.

But as life often does, it turned. In my teenage years, at Secondary School in Terengganu, I faced what I can only call a Dark Night of the Soul. One evening, I was completely absorbed in a collage — cutting and pasting images from my eldest brother’s old magazines, lost in the flow of making. Then, my mother came out of her room. Without a word, she turned off the light, slammed the door, and went back to bed.

There I was, left in the dark with sticky fingers, glue, and paper — and tears I couldn’t hold back. That night I vowed never to have anything to do with art again. Not to visit a gallery. Not to even read about it. I buried the brush and locked the palette away.

It took me ten long years to break that vow. Only after moving to Milwaukee, Wisconsin, did I find my way back to painting again. It was as if the colors had been waiting for me all along, patient and forgiving.

Looking back, I see it as a necessary passage — the light of childhood, the darkness of rejection, and the slow dawn of a return. That’s how life teaches. That’s how art saves.

Looking back, I see it as a necessary passage — the light of childhood, the darkness of rejection, and the slow dawn of a return. That’s how life teaches. That’s how art saves.

As Neville Goddard reminds us: “Live from the end… You are Imagination itself. Feel the desire already fulfilled. Everything is working out for me!”

And truly, that is what art has been for me all along — not a career, not a pastime, but the living out of imagination, the fulfillment of a promise made at birth.

🎨🌿

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