Love, Loss and Letting Go… A Behind the Scenes Video of Mine For a Moment

October is Breast Cancer Awareness month, so I think it’s the perfect time to share a video that our team has been working on for quite some time: Behind The Scenes of my painting Mine For a Moment, which I painted after I lost a friend to cancer.

I’m excited that it’s finished, and that we now have a beautiful, moving way to present what this painting is all about, and remind people of our mission. From the beginning, we’ve been giving lithographs of Mine For a Moment away to people who have experienced personal loss or are working through grief in any form.

I’m amazed at how God has used this painting already to help bring peace to the couple who lost their child, the woman whose father passed away from cancer, and even a dear lady who had envisioned this exact scene at a retreat to help deal with aborting her baby over 30 years ago. (Read that story here.)

Mine For a Moment - Oil on Canvas

I hope that you’ll share this video on Facebook, Twitter, or by email.  Prints may be requested or donated to a friend either by visiting the Mine For a Moment website. More purchase options are available on TheArtistOfLife.com.

Cancer isn’t just something I hear about on the news or from a friend.  It’s very real to me now.  My Dad recently became cancer free after a year of waiting, treatment, and then finally receiving the great news that the cells were gone!  I’m grateful for the advances that are being made in medicine and treatment.  Consider taking this month and getting involved in the fight against cancer prevention and treatment.  Visit Susan G. Komen’s website for a great place to start.

The Call That Reminded Me Of My Call

I never know how God is going to use a painting that He’s called me to create. I may think I’m making it for one reason, but He uses it in a completely different way in someone’s life.

This truth presented itself in a powerful way last week!

A woman (we’ll call her Kay) called me on Thursday morning and said she didn’t really know how to tell me what she was about to say, but that one of my paintings had touched her deeply.  She proceeded to tell me that she had an abortion 30 years ago. She had dealt with a lot of pain and guilt since then, and had gotten involved with an organization called Rachel’s Vineyard.  This organization is dedicated to helping post-abortive women (and men) come to a place of healing and forgiveness for decisions they made in the past. Kay told me that she had attended one of their retreats and on it, they asked the women to visualize a beautiful field with children laughing and playing with Jesus. The sun was shining, and everyone was joyful. Kay took great comfort knowing that her unborn child was with Jesus and that some day she would get to meet her.

I say “her” because Kay is certain that her baby would have been a little girl… with brown hair and brown eyes.  She’s always felt it, and she even knew that her name would have been Rachel.

Fast forward to just a few weeks ago: Kay went to her dear friend’s home and saw a large package sitting out for her. It was a gift, and in it was a lithograph of my painting “Mine For a Moment.” She took it out and was moved to tears. For her, it was a depiction of her own daughter, grown up and playing in a field with Jesus.

My Experience Designing for Extreme Home Makeover!

I had an an incredible opportunity last week to be involved with Extreme Makeover Home Edition! While I can’t be very specific about (or post photos of) the design I worked on until the episode airs on November 14th, there are some things I can share. We worked on rebuilding Lighthouse Christian School, part of which was destroyed in the flood Nashville experienced in May of 2010. It is run by the Sweatt family, who we found out actually lives in our neighborhood! Many of you may remember this image that made its way through the national media circuits:

Part of Lighthouse Christian School's preschool floating down I-24

Many people have been asking questions about this past week. I’ll try to cover some of them here!

How did I get involved?

Nate and I heard about Extreme Makeover Home Edition coming to the Nashville area through our neighbor, Famous Donna, who coordinated the catering for the whole event. We knew right away that we wanted to be involved in a worthy effort to restore hope and happiness to some deserving people. I cry just about every time I catch an episode on TV! Admit it… you do too.

We signed up on the website to volunteer. I submitted a link to my website along with my application and indicated that I was an artist and graphic designer, and happy to help with any project that could use a creative or detailed touch. Very soon, a design producer named Courtney Sanders contacted me and said she had a project she wanted to give me full control over. It was her “baby” and she wanted it to be stunning and she loved my work. Imagine my excitement over getting to have full design privileges on a special project!

“Mine For A Moment”

In the fall of 2008, while I was planning my wedding, a strong, courageous friend of mine was fighting for his life.

At age 34, Daniel Smith was vibrant, healthy, and full of promise. He was finishing medical school and running more marathons than I could count. He seemed to have his whole life ahead of him. On October 22, Daniel lost his 6-month long battle against squamous cell oral cancer.

I heard the news after coming back from my honeymoon. I know I cannot adequately describe how this news affected me, but I will try:

I experienced deep sadness, sympathy for his family and the painful sting of loss, all of which is to be expected. What I did not expect was to be confronted with the fear that Nate could be taken from me in a similar way.

Life was now fragile and unpredictable….fleeting. Of course, it always has been, but now I had this new person in my life that I wanted to hold on to so tightly.

For days, I considered the possibility of losing Nate. How would I be able to go on without this amazing man in my life? But this couldn’t really happen, could it? After all, God had given him to me; wasn’t that a guarantee that my next 50 years would be wonderful?

As naïve as that sounds, it really is how I felt. The evening I heard about Daniel’s passing, I was struggling to balance loving fiercely with a willingness to let go. Then something happened that I can only attribute to God’s leading.

Creating a Moment in Time… My Latest Painting

I was recently commissioned to paint a lovely woman named Loma. She lived a long, happy life, and recently passed away in her 90′s. The family wanted to memorialize her in a painting, which will be displayed above the mantle in the grandchildren’s play room.

Loma was a vibrant, amazing woman, and had stunning blue eyes, porcelain skin, and high cheekbones. Sherry, my client, wanted the painting to depict Loma in her youth, and a traditional head and shoulders style portrait simply would not do!

Sherry provided me with several reference photos from the 1940′s, all black and white and showing signs of their age. I realized quickly that this portrait would be a challenging one, but I knew how important the project was. The photo we decided to use was of Loma sitting on an uneven bar in someone’s backyard. Sherry mentioned that Loma had always loved sunflowers, so it seemed fitting to have a field of the beautiful flowers in the background of the painting. I went on a search to find the perfect field – one that had a fence that we could place her on.

After selecting the reference photos, I used my Photoshop program and my graphic design background to lay out the composition and get Sherry’s approval before starting to paint. We agreed on details such as what color to make her skirt stripes, and whether she preferred a white fence or a natural one, and then the magic began…

I spent about 2 weeks working on this painting.  I was pleased with how it progressed, and enjoyed making decisions such as shadow placement, how to paint the sky, and what to do with the lower part of the fence and ground without reference material.

Recent work: Meet the kids “behind” the painting!

I recently had the pleasure of painting Andy Andrews’ little boys.  If you are unfamiliar with Andy, please check out his website! He’s an incredible speaker and a New York Times best-selling author, and a wildly funny and inspirational guy.  Last month, he asked me to create a painting from an adorable photograph of his two boys as a gift to his wife Polly.  Nate and I delivered it last weekend to their home in Orange Beach, AL and spent the weekend with the family.  It was a great time, and when the oldest boy saw it, he exclaimed: “Wow!  You made our butts so lifelike!”  Ha!  How’s that for a quote?

Below is the painting:

And here is a photo of Nate and I with the Adam and Austin (who are a bit older now):

Santa does side jobs? :)

Many of you are familiar with my painting entitled “Unblemished,” which depicts an old gentleman holding a little lamb.  Some of you have even read my account of how the painting came to be.  What you don’t know yet is that he’s still doing his Santa gig during the holidays, and my husband and I ran into him at Gaylord Opryland’s Hall of Trees, where my artwork is being auctioned this month!

Nate and I were in Jackson, TN for another art show the weekend before Thanksgiving, so we had hired someone to set up our tree and art display at Opryland’s Hall of Trees this year.  When we arrived the next week to see the exhibit, we were surprised with much more!

Behind the Scenes of “Unblemished”

The Inspiration…

I saw this painting in my mind more than 2 years before I began painting it. I was reading I Peter 1:18-20:

“For you know that God paid a ransom to save you from the empty life you inherited from your ancestors. And the ransom he paid was not mere gold or silver. It was the precious blood of Christ, the sinless, spotless Lamb of God. God chose him as your ransom long before the world began, but he has now revealed him to you in these last days.”

I got a vision for a painting of God holding a lamb, both loving him, but also knowing He had to let him go. The lamb, of course, is Christ. We are also all biblically like the lamb in the painting, and God is our shepherd who loves us.

Next, you’ll read the incredible story of how this painting came to be, complete with never-before-seen photos of the day of the shoot. I still can’t believe how it all happened…