A dream come true?

A year has passed since my mom passed away. As I slowly started to organize the things that she left behind, I happened to find a box of watercolors tucked away in the storage room. When my parents came to retire in Canada in the late 1980s, Mom enrolled in ELS to learn English and registered for a watercolor painting class at a nearby senior centre. She was full of energy and had aspirations to pursue hobbies that she always wanted to try out, and among all other things, it was watercolor painting.

I opened the box with curiosity mixed with excitement. Inside were dried-up watercolor paint tubes, a palette with paint stains, a bunch of paint brushes, and other utensils such as erasers and drawing pencils. Suddenly, with the lid open, the wooden paint box became alive again. It felt as though the color stains on the plastic palette were asking me to take over where my Mom left behind.

So I took the wooden box to the nearest art supply shop and asked if I could still use the dried-up paint tubes and paint brushes that were carefully bundled in a bamboo sushi roller.

“Sure, the dried paint tubes just need a bit of water. Oh, and the paint brushes….these are sable, not commonly seen these days, and are quite precious. Your mom took such good care of them! You are lucky.”

I returned home with excitement and instantly thought of the old photo album of my first trip to Tuscany with my Mom in 1987. In the album, I wrote:

“The scenery of Tuscany is amazingly soothing. The gentle color of the olive trees that cover the rolling hills and the orange roofs of the houses that dot the landscape… What a harmony of colors! I would love to convert a Tuscan farmhouse into a villa and spend the days taking a walk and painting. It would be a dream come true!”

Old pencil sketch at Vinci, Tuscany, 1987

Well, I renovated a house, not a farmhouse, and it is not a villa in Tuscany but an old house in Umbria. But it looks like I am walking in the right direction (although winding) to reach a dream that I noted down at Vinci some 37 years ago! Perhaps my Mom is hinting to me that I should not forget my dream and paint the beautiful landscapes of Umbria!

Another new project to start this fall….

Learning how to paint.