When I began painting again, I did not know what I wanted to paint. Thought remained obstructed, and any image chosen in advance felt false. I turned to fluid colors because they could move when I could not. I allowed them to flow, meet, resist, and merge without asking them to illustrate an idea. For a while, the work required me to follow rather than lead.
Zoya’s words about painting freely returned with a meaning I had not known when she first spoke them. Freedom did not mean carelessness, nor did it mean that every accidental mark was true. It meant refusing to force the surface to confirm a conclusion I had already reached. I had to give the unknown enough room to appear, then bring my full attention to what had emerged.
When I stepped back from the absorbed state of painting, an image would be waiting before me. It contained forms I had not consciously intended and relations I did not yet understand. I was no longer transferring a known feeling onto a surface; feeling was becoming material before thought could organize it. Then the finished image returned that material to me in a form I could encounter.
At first, the paintings were black, dark, and painful. Working on them drew me toward the grief I could not master, but the surface introduced an important difference. Inside me, pain had seemed without boundary. In a painting, it acquired color, density, direction, and edge. It could be approached, left, and approached again. The loss had not moved, but my relation to it was no longer completely fixed.
This is difficult to describe without making art sound magical. The painting did not treat grief as an illness, and it did not repair what had happened. Its power was concrete: feeling became material, and material could move and change. As the material changed, it revealed relationships that deliberate thought had been unable to imagine. The image did not solve the pain; it made the pain encounterable.
In retrospect, the process drew upon lessons from much earlier in my life. In the basement, trembling candlelight had released strange forms from ordinary objects, and I had learned to observe them before naming them. Beside Doman, I had learned to attend to movement before there was proof of where it might lead. I did not consciously place these memories into the paintings; they had become habits of perception, ready to serve me when conscious intention could do very little.
Then light began to appear within the blackness of the paintings. I had not placed it there as a message of hope; at that time, I could not honestly claim to feel hope in my life. The lighter forms emerged from the same free process as everything around them, before I had decided what they meant. The work seemed to know of an opening that my conscious mind could not yet accept.
I approached this cautiously. Light could easily become a false promise—a beautiful way of denying the severity of loss. But in the paintings it did not erase the darker forms or force them into the background. Both remained. The surface could contain what I had believed life could not: sorrow without total closure, continuation without forgetting.
This was not a single revelation. I returned to the work over many paintings. In some, darkness dominated; in others, an opening appeared faintly and almost disappeared. I did not repeat a symbol or impose a formula in which every image had to move from blackness toward brightness. Each painting had to discover its own order, and sometimes the order remained troubled.
Every work drew me first into turmoil. Colors encountered and resisted one another; areas gathered density while others opened. Gradually, a relation might emerge among them. Order did not mean neatness, symmetry, or the removal of conflict; it meant that the different forces in the painting could occupy one surface without destroying one another. I began to need the same capacity within myself.
The repetition mattered. A feeling that returns unchanged becomes a prison; a feeling that can take another form has begun to enter time. Day after day, grief appeared differently on the surface. Its truth did not diminish, but it ceased to be only one immovable mass. It developed variations, distances, and moments of rest. The paintings gave sorrow somewhere to move without requiring it to leave.
As this process continued, I began to recognize compassion within the work. Much of my life had been shaped by attention to the pain of others. I had looked for hidden suffering in the eyes of strangers; I had tried to understand children before judging their responses; I had remained beside Doman through years in which possibility offered little proof. Yet after Zoya’s death, I could not offer the same patience to my own grief. I treated every movement toward life as failure and every moment of relief as disloyalty.
The paintings gradually created another relation. Compassion did not ask me to suffer less for my daughter; it asked me to stop using suffering as the only measure of love. I could remain faithful to Zoya’s absence without making an eternal punishment of my life. This understanding arrived first as form and only later as thought.
I began to see why painting affected me so deeply. What lived inside the self as undivided experience could be placed outside it without being rejected. Once visible, it could be met with attention rather than only endured. Color gave difference to what had felt absolute; movement gave time to what had felt permanent; form gave a boundary to what had seemed endless.
The paintings changed me, and that change affected what I could paint next. This created a living exchange between inner experience and material form. I brought pain to the surface; the surface returned an image containing more than pain; that image enlarged what I was able to contain within myself. Through repeated work, grief, love, memory, and continuation no longer had to exist in separate worlds.
None of this made Zoya’s death less real. Her absence has not been repaired. The sorrow attached to her memory remains, and there are truths no artistic process should soften. What changed was the space available around the sorrow—it was no longer the whole of the inner world. Art did not ask grief to end; it allowed life to exist beside it.
When I began painting again, I did not know what I wanted to paint. Thought remained obstructed, and any image chosen in advance felt false. I turned to fluid colors because they could move when I could not. I allowed them to flow, meet, resist, and merge without asking them to illustrate an idea. For a while, the work required me to follow rather than lead.
Zoya’s words about painting freely returned with a meaning I had not known when she first spoke them. Freedom did not mean carelessness, nor did it mean that every accidental mark was true. It meant refusing to force the surface to confirm a conclusion I had already reached. I had to give the unknown enough room to appear, then bring my full attention to what had emerged.
When I stepped back from the absorbed state of painting, an image would be waiting before me. It contained forms I had not consciously intended and relations I did not yet understand. I was no longer transferring a known feeling onto a surface; feeling was becoming material before thought could organize it. Then the finished image returned that material to me in a form I could encounter.
At first, the paintings were black, dark, and painful. Working on them drew me toward the grief I could not master, but the surface introduced an important difference. Inside me, pain had seemed without boundary. In a painting, it acquired color, density, direction, and edge. It could be approached, left, and approached again. The loss had not moved, but my relation to it was no longer completely fixed.
This is difficult to describe without making art sound magical. The painting did not treat grief as an illness, and it did not repair what had happened. Its power was concrete: feeling became material, and material could move and change. As the material changed, it revealed relationships that deliberate thought had been unable to imagine. The image did not solve the pain; it made the pain encounterable.
In retrospect, the process drew upon lessons from much earlier in my life. In the basement, trembling candlelight had released strange forms from ordinary objects, and I had learned to observe them before naming them. Beside Doman, I had learned to attend to movement before there was proof of where it might lead. I did not consciously place these memories into the paintings; they had become habits of perception, ready to serve me when conscious intention could do very little.
Then light began to appear within the blackness of the paintings. I had not placed it there as a message of hope; at that time, I could not honestly claim to feel hope in my life. The lighter forms emerged from the same free process as everything around them, before I had decided what they meant. The work seemed to know of an opening that my conscious mind could not yet accept.
I approached this cautiously. Light could easily become a false promise—a beautiful way of denying the severity of loss. But in the paintings it did not erase the darker forms or force them into the background. Both remained. The surface could contain what I had believed life could not: sorrow without total closure, continuation without forgetting.
This was not a single revelation. I returned to the work over many paintings. In some, darkness dominated; in others, an opening appeared faintly and almost disappeared. I did not repeat a symbol or impose a formula in which every image had to move from blackness toward brightness. Each painting had to discover its own order, and sometimes the order remained troubled.
Every work drew me first into turmoil. Colors encountered and resisted one another; areas gathered density while others opened. Gradually, a relation might emerge among them. Order did not mean neatness, symmetry, or the removal of conflict; it meant that the different forces in the painting could occupy one surface without destroying one another. I began to need the same capacity within myself.
The repetition mattered. A feeling that returns unchanged becomes a prison; a feeling that can take another form has begun to enter time. Day after day, grief appeared differently on the surface. Its truth did not diminish, but it ceased to be only one immovable mass. It developed variations, distances, and moments of rest. The paintings gave sorrow somewhere to move without requiring it to leave.
As this process continued, I began to recognize compassion within the work. Much of my life had been shaped by attention to the pain of others. I had looked for hidden suffering in the eyes of strangers; I had tried to understand children before judging their responses; I had remained beside Doman through years in which possibility offered little proof. Yet after Zoya’s death, I could not offer the same patience to my own grief. I treated every movement toward life as failure and every moment of relief as disloyalty.
The paintings gradually created another relation. Compassion did not ask me to suffer less for my daughter; it asked me to stop using suffering as the only measure of love. I could remain faithful to Zoya’s absence without making an eternal punishment of my life. This understanding arrived first as form and only later as thought.
I began to see why painting affected me so deeply. What lived inside the self as undivided experience could be placed outside it without being rejected. Once visible, it could be met with attention rather than only endured. Color gave difference to what had felt absolute; movement gave time to what had felt permanent; form gave a boundary to what had seemed endless.
The paintings changed me, and that change affected what I could paint next. This created a living exchange between inner experience and material form. I brought pain to the surface; the surface returned an image containing more than pain; that image enlarged what I was able to contain within myself. Through repeated work, grief, love, memory, and continuation no longer had to exist in separate worlds.
None of this made Zoya’s death less real. Her absence has not been repaired. The sorrow attached to her memory remains, and there are truths no artistic process should soften. What changed was the space available around the sorrow—it was no longer the whole of the inner world. Art did not ask grief to end; it allowed life to exist beside it.