(Process pics for this piece are in the gallery below. I've included a few detail closeups since they're a little harder to capture in the larger image.)

As a sensitive kid with a tender heart, I was pressured to harden or toughen it up by people who meant well, and they often explained it was "for your own good". No doubt they envisioned me being chewed up and spit out by the world. They equated that tenderness with weakness that made me vulnerable, and not in a good way.

For a long time, I believed them. It is hard to be a tenderhearted person in this harsh world. But I reached a point where I realized that my tender heart was a super power, an ability to stay open and soft in spite of that harshness, to choose softness even though you know it comes with hurt.

And now we're in a time that is unmaking and remaking us all, everywhere, and the world with it. I don't know if it would be easier for me if I weren't this way, but it doesn't really matter. I can't be something I'm not, and more importantly, I don't want to be.

And, I suspect, if we're going to come out of this thing for the better, the world is going to need more of the courage to be tender, not less.

A few details about the making of this piece…

I started this piece a few weeks ago, the first time I’d had a canvas on the easel in awhile. I've been working in my art journal and the old calendar junk journal lately, but it's been a very long time since I felt like doing a canvas. As with so many others, I wasn’t sure where this one was headed, but the old, partially-finished coloring book page done by my goddaughter several years ago provided some inspiration. Primarily in palette, but possibly also in my decision to include an upside-down image of Czar Peter I in this early layer. Disney princess vs Russian prince amuses me. Systems of oppression are a trip, man.

The beads on copper wire were originally curtain tiebacks I made many moons ago for our living room curtains (which I also made). We've changed things up a couple of times in that room since then, including putting up different curtains, so they were stashed in my found objects box waiting to be repurposed for several years. I finally found the perfect use for them.

The thin wires woven around the copper and beads and running across the loop are twisty ties from produce with all the paper stripped off. We have a drawer full of them because we reuse them, but I also repurpose them all the time in my art work. All of my great grandparents had drawers like that, products of the Depression Era. As a kid, I had a kind of affectionate bewilderment about my great grandparents’ habits of squirreling away these odds and ends, but as I got older, I realized their generation were the OG reduce/reuse/repurpose/recycle pioneers.