The Rustic Door

Through all my years of painting there has been one constant. I picked up the brush late, well into my forties, and from the first canvas she was the one I showed it to. Her opinion is honest to a fault. If she does not like something she tells me to my face, and more than once she has told me a painting was terrible.

This one began with her too. She said I should try something rustic, Italian or Mediterranean, and when I asked what she meant she threw a stack of images at me. This was one of them, a small watercolor made for paint by numbers, probably put together by a computer. I took the bones of it and made it my own, then painted it large enough to hold a living room wall. The weathered door, the bougainvillea coming over the top, the barrel and the flowers: they are hers as much as mine.