Melissa Stephens Art

If there’s one thing I’ve learned about myself, it’s that I love to tell stories, my stories. I use writing as a vehicle to understand and appreciate my life. I’ve been a journaler for as long as I can remember and, in the last 20 or so years, I’ve relied on a daily gratitude journal practice to help me focus on the positives, on the joy in the ordinary, everyday moments of my life. Another favorite storytelling tool for me is photography. When I was in college, my mom gave me a Canon AE-1 film camera and since then I’ve been hooked on documenting my life through the lens of my SLR. Children came, digital photography hit the scene, and 30-some thousand images later, I’ve attempted to freeze time and capture our family’s life in millions of megapixels! When I found the art of scrapbooking, memory keeping, I embraced the opportunity to write words to accompany my photos. In album after album, I’ve told my great love story for my family. Years later, with our children grown, I’ve all but abandoned my DSLR and my scrapbooking supplies in favor of my iPhone camera and my paint brushes. I’ve listened to the voice deep inside me urging me to try a new lens, drawing and painting, to help me pay attention to and express my love for the world I experience. Each painting and drawing, like each photograph before, has a story that accompanies it. Art is my next chapter, the next story thread in my life, one I have a desire to document and share, but how?

Years ago, when I was writing a blog concerning environmental issues for our church, I consulted one of my sons for his opinion on a post (he was an environmental studies major in college). He said to me, “Mom, I’m surprised you’ don’t have your own blog, it seems like something you’d enjoy.” He was right, I did enjoy it! I enjoy long form writing, not a novel by any stretch of the imagination, but short stories. I love the rush of words pouring out of my mind followed by the slow process of revising and editing. I love the perspective I gain from “writing it out.” When I started learning to paint, I challenged myself to be brave and to share my art journey, what I was making and what I was learning. At that time sharing, for me, took the form of Instagram, a platform I had used personally for years. I created a separate account for my art and I was off and running, painting and sharing, approximately once per month, that was my goal. It was good for a while, until it wasn’t. I found myself laboring over each post, spending way too much time editing and re-editing my text, feeling like I had more that I wanted to say yet always feeling constrained. I wasn’t interested in promoting myself for art sales nor in learning to make video content, which seemed to be the direction Instagram was moving. I simply wanted to share my art journey through photos and words.

After much reflection, I circled back to my son’s suggestion that I would enjoy blogging: writing, sharing images, documenting my story. Words mean a lot to me. I often embed them in the under layers of my paintings, anchoring the piece in my own handwriting, like all the handwritten journaling I used to do on my scrapbook pages. I love to scrawl my handwriting into wet layers of paint to add visual interest and I love to include words, often old dictionary pages, sheet music and maps, as collage layers that peek through the paint in the finished piece. No painting feels done until words, in some form, find their way into my work. I’m excited to use my words, my art, and my photos to understand, tell, and appreciate the stories of my life.