Grief and Art often meet in the quiet, complicated journey of caring for others. Care can look ordinary from the outside. It is driving someone to appointments, sitting quietly in waiting rooms, making meals, worrying through the night, or simply showing up again and again. Beneath those ordinary moments lies an emotional landscape that is anything but ordinary. Much of what caregiving asks of us remains invisible to everyone except those living it.
My painting Things Otherwise Unseen, created for the Care exhibition at the South Haven Center for the Arts, grew from that invisible landscape. Over five years, both my parents and my husband’s parents passed away. Each loss felt like another wave crashing into our lives. The words “life attack” appear within the painting because grief often arrives that way—not as a single event, but as repeated blows that leave us changed beneath the surface.
In my recent paintings, you can often find me by looking for the birds. These quirky little creatures tumble, drift, spin, and wander through the composition. They are never quite settled because I rarely feel settled myself. They carry pieces of my experience across the canvas, allowing multiple moments, emotions, and memories to exist together. Through Grief and Art, they move within the liminal spaces between caregiving and loss, exhaustion and hope, presence and absence.
Caregiving itself is much like that. While helping another person, we are often living several lives at once. We are remembering who someone once was while adapting to who they are becoming. We are managing practical responsibilities while carrying private fears. We continue to love even as we grieve changes that have already begun. Art allows these invisible experiences to take form. Layers of paint, symbols, texture, and unexpected imagery become a language for emotions that words alone often cannot express. Through the creative process, I discover connections that I could never have planned. Creativity reveals what everyday life often conceals. Perhaps that is what caring ultimately teaches us. The greatest acts of love are not always the most visible ones. They often happen quietly, beneath the surface, where patience, endurance, worry, compassion, and hope coexist. They leave marks that others may never see, though they shape us profoundly.
For me, Grief and Art are connected through the need to understand, remember, and make visible what has been carried privately. Things Otherwise Unseen is my attempt to honor caregivers, acknowledge loss, and remind us that some of life’s deepest experiences can only be understood by looking beyond what first appears.
