People sometimes think hope is a soft word. A nice word for a card. For me, hope is not soft at all. Hope is what you do on the hard morning, when the news is bad, when money is tight, when your body hurts, when a door you counted on closes. Hope is getting up anyway. That is what I tried to paint in There Is Hope.
A painting about rising
There Is Hope is 32 by 44 inches, oil on canvas. I did not paint a person climbing or a sun coming up over a hill. I paint abstract because feelings do not have one shape. For one person, rising means recovering after an illness. For another, it means starting again after losing a job, or keeping a family together through a difficult year. If I paint the feeling honestly, each person who stands in front of it can find their own story inside it.
The movement in the painting goes upward. The darker, heavier colors sit low. The lighter colors lift. I kept pushing the color up, opening space at the top, letting light break through the layers, because that is what rising feels like from inside. It is not sudden. It happens in layers, slowly, the way oil paint itself is built.
What hope looks like in color
Ask me what hope looks like and I will not show you only yellow or only white. Pure brightness with nothing under it feels false to me. Real hope has darkness in the painting too, because real life has darkness in it. The question is which way the painting is moving.
In There Is Hope, the warm tones carry the promise. Warmth is life — a home with light in the windows, a table with people around it, a morning after a long night. The cooler, deeper passages make that light mean more when it arrives. If everything were light, there would be no rising. There would be nothing to rise from.
This is also why I paint in oil. Oil dries slowly, so I can lay one layer down, let it set, and build the next one over it. Hope works the same way. You do one honest thing today. Tomorrow you do another. After a while, the surface has changed. Collectors tell me this painting feels different in morning and evening light. I believe them — the layers catch the light at different hours, and the painting keeps lifting either way.
Why I gave it this title
I do not give my paintings titles to explain them away. A title should open a door, not close one. But this title, I meant plainly: There Is Hope. Not there might be hope. Not there was hope once. There is hope — now, in the present, in your house, in this season of your life.
I am a living artist, painting now in Riverside, California, for people living now. That matters to me. When this painting hangs in your home, it is not a relic from someone long gone. It is a statement made by a painter who is still here, still working, still believing that a room can hold courage as well as furniture. If you write to me about it, I can answer you myself and tell you what was on my easel and in my heart when I made it.
Where it belongs
At 32 by 44 inches, There Is Hope is big enough to carry a living room wall over a sofa, a dining room where family gathers, or an entry where you want the first thing you see coming home to lift you. I have also seen paintings like this change an office or a waiting room — places where people sit with worry and could use one honest, warm thing to look at.
Hang it where the light changes during the day. Give it a little space around it. Then live with it for a week before you judge it. Paintings about hope do their work quietly, over time, on ordinary Tuesdays — not only on the day they arrive.
Every painting of mine is a single original, never printed, signed by my hand. There is only one There Is Hope. If it speaks to you, I think I know why. It is saying the thing we all need to hear from time to time, in color instead of words: keep rising. There is hope.
Looking for the right piece for your wall? Write to me at [email protected] — tell me about your room and I will help you find the painting that belongs there, and tell you the story behind it.