The Painting I Couldn't Finish for Three Years

The canvas had been sitting turned against the wall since early 2021. I'd started it during the first lockdown — large, ambitious, three figures in a scene I couldn't figure out how to resolve. Every time I tried to work on it, I'd add a few marks, decide they were wrong, and turn it back around.

I set up my studio before dosing. Cleaned brushes, laid out colors, turned the canvas outward. Then I made tea with 2.5 grams and sat on the couch to wait.

The first hour was anxiety. Not bad anxiety, but the familiar held-breath feeling of psilocybin coming on. I noticed I was looking at the canvas from the corner of my eye, not directly at it. Afraid of it.

By the second hour the fear had dissolved into something closer to curiosity. The painting stopped looking like a problem and started looking like a question. I walked over and looked at it for a long time without picking up a brush. The three figures were in conversation but I'd been treating them as separate compositional problems. They weren't separate.

I started painting. I don't know exactly how much time passed. At some point I was crying — not from sadness but from something releasing, the way a cramp releases. The figures came into relationship with each other in a way I'd been avoiding because it made the painting about something personal, and that had scared me.

When I came down enough to step back, the canvas looked almost finished. I worked on it for another two sessions over the following weeks — small refinements — and it went to a gallery in March. Several people asked what it was about. I told them it was about something I'd needed to say for three years.