My wings were barely there
The assignment was eight paintings. I made nine. All butterflies, in a 3×3 grid I hadn't planned, made in the first weeks after I quit my job. I was happy and afraid at the same time. I didn't understand that then. I think I do now.
The first thing I did was paint. Not because I had a plan, not because I wanted to. I painted because I had already made the decision and the decision needed a body to live in it, and the studio was there, and the morning was mine in a way mornings hadn't been mine in thirty years, and the freedom didn't feel entirely real yet, so I went in anyway, the way you test ice before stepping out or diving in.
I was waiting for someone to come and tell me it was going to be fine. No one came. It took a little while to understand that no one was going to. I had to be my own hero.
So I danced.
Dance
I put on Chico Buarque, which is what I do when I need to go inward. I am afraid and scared, confident and hopeful, waiting for the illumination that will stop the doubts, two steps left, two steps right, trying not to freeze completely. Somehow a song from the 80s came back to me. Billy Idol. "Dancing with Myself." I never fully understood it when I was young. My English was crude back then and never really spent time trying to understand the lyrics. I knew it made me ignore my serious self and dance like nothing else mattered. I get that now. Nothing else really mattered. I had made my bed. The least I could do was enjoy lying in it. Billy Idol and Chico Buarque, never knew they would go together. But that is right? We find meaning in what we have.
That is what I needed to feel I would be alright. I just needed to keep dancing. With abandonment or carefulness, two steps left, two steps right.
The Mastery Program had given me an assignment: a production week. Eight paintings in a week. I made nine in two.
Each one 12x12 inches. Nine pieces in a 3x3 grid, different portraits of the same moment. Little steps toward a much bigger universe that was opening in front of me, unknown. I didn't know what was in it. I was starting to remember that not knowing what's coming next hadn't bothered me so much when I was younger.
Edge of Possibility. The first of the nine. I had no plan for butterflies. They arrived before I did.
II called the series Dancing with Myself. The song reference lands where it lands. What I meant was simpler: sometimes you need to rely on yourself, for the good and for the bad.
Butterflies
The butterflies were recording something I recognized but couldn't name while it was happening.
In 1994 I boarded a plane from Rio with a thousand dollars — lodging, food, and everything else included — and forty-five days ahead of me in Europe alone. No cellphone. No way to text home. I thought I was risking too much. I knew no one. The plane stopped in São Paulo, Asunción, Fortaleza before Madrid, and I cried for some of it. And then it was the best decision I had ever made.
The fear I felt that morning I didn't go to work was familiar. Same voice: you are risking too much, you should know better, the security you are leaving behind is worth more than whatever you think is on the other side.
I had heard it and I knew how the story ended.
Pulse Between Worlds. What does it feel like to stand between two lives, still belonging to both?
Butterflies are what you feel in your belly when you are afraid. Or when you are in love. They are a symbol of transformation, of how completely something can change from what it was. And they do not last.
That moment — the weeks after I quit, the nine paintings made in two weeks — was also brief and fragile. I knew while it was happening that it would not stay. It would pass and become something else. I painted it nine times so I would not forget.
I wondered, looking at them, whether I was the butterfly in those paintings.
I am no butterfly. I found that later. But that moment was.
In hindsight, my wings were barely there, but that is a story for another day.
