Dear Friends,
One of my first memories is of clutching a picture book to my chest and thinking, “Oh! If I could only grow up and draw pictures like these!” I was lucky that my parents, who were amateur oil painters, nurtured my artistic interests by letting me choose one art supply every time they went to the art store.
Fast forward 15 years. I have written about how I struggled with mental health during my teen years and my adulthood. By my teens and early twenties, every time I picked up a pencil or paintbrush, my hand felt like it didn’t belong to me. Every painting I did looked wrong or ridiculous, and the painting sessions ended in frustration.
For over a decade, I didn’t draw a thing, and I wondered if that early joy that I’d felt with drawing would ever return.
It did. It wasn’t easy, and it took impossible deadlines (I had a five-week deadline to produce my picture book, Greenbeard the Pirate Pig) that forced me out of my head, combined with a deep yearning to create that I couldn’t ignore, to overcome the corrosive self-doubt.
Finally, my hands began to reconnect with my heart and my love for art came back.
And so it is with joy that I present my new-and-improved gallery on my new streamlined website. As I create more art, I will share it with you, and you will have the chance to buy downloads, NFTs, as well as traditionally made art such as oils and acrylics on canvas.
To celebrate this long, continuing journey back to joy, I would like to share with you a download of one of my favourite pieces. It is a watercolour of two children sharing a book.
I would never want to go back to those days of darkness and quite frankly, despair, but I think that because of them I feel this new joy that much more keenly. Every day is a practice of gratitude, of remembering to breathe and allowing life to flow.
With thanks,
Andrea
[You may use this for any non-commercial purpose, including creating posters, greeting cards, or T-shirts through print-on-demand companies.]