Meet Defiant
DEFIANT | 36 X 36 | ORIGINAL ON CANVAS
Back in 2024, I did what a good student does. I joined a course that promised to teach me how to build an art business, and I followed the syllabus. Get your art onto prints, because prints sell fast. Put it on mugs and tote bags, because who wouldn't want to carry a piece of it around. Add a "buy now" button every few inches, because that's how retail works.
I did all of it. And somewhere in the middle of doing it, I realized the course wasn't wrong about how to sell things — it was just answering a question I hadn't actually asked. It was turning my art into a commodity, something to move off a shelf, when what I actually wanted to know was why anyone would want to hold onto it in the first place. I left the course without finishing it, because it couldn't give me that answer. Only sitting with my own work, slowly, could.
Nowhere is that slowness more obvious than in one particular painting, which has been sitting in my studio in one form or another for over two years now. It went through several identities before this one — different colors, different compositions, a couple of names I've since let go of — because I refused to rush it to market just to have something to sell. If I'd stayed on that course's timeline, this piece would have been "product" a year and a half ago. Instead, it got to keep becoming itself.
Eventually it told me its own name: Defiant, because the woman inside it defies whatever "normal" is supposed to look like, just to keep being herself. After that, I started asking people who stopped in front of it a strange question — what does this taste like? The answers came back nothing alike — strawberry ice cream, mango, bubblegum, spruce tree, a cupcake, something too sweet, something sweet and tangy. Every answer was true, because every answer was really about the person standing there, not about me.
Where it started.
Where it lived for a while, as “Live to Play.”
Where it landed.
...I should say this honestly: I didn't pick up a brush because I decided to. I'd tried before, more than once, years earlier, and it never came together. It was only after I lost my dog Sam that this actually arrived — not chosen, just necessary.
What started as ache, as grief, as the kind of pain that doesn't have a shape yet, came out as a color blast. Because that's exactly what Sam felt like — not one feeling at a time, but all of them at once, running through me the way any child runs through a parent: love and worry and joy and fear, tangled together, too much to separate into single colors. So I didn't. I let them all land on the canvas at once, exactly as they arrived.
That's Defiant. Not one feeling, dressed up. All of them, refusing to be sorted.
