Painting Joy

Tarah Trueblood preps her corner of the shared studio space and opens the desk drawers containing tubs of bottled oil paints. The topmost drawer holds her neutrals, the middle the warm colors and the bottom the cool colors. 

She arranges her materials on her desk: a clutter of bottles, jars and cans filled with paints, water, mineral spirits and watercolor fixatives. 

Her corner is coated with inspiration. Printed pictures of abstract paintings, sources of future inspiration, litter the wall. Specs and splatters of paint and echoes of past inspiration decorate every surface. She dons forearm-length rubber gloves, protecting her arms from her present inspiration. 

Trueblood is the director of the Miami University Center for American and World Cultures, a former corporate finance lawyer, an ordained Methodist minister and, as often as she can be, an artist. 

She paints abstract art because it’s expressive. There are no rules to follow: no lines to make straight or forms to shade just right. She experiments. She makes strokes, blends strokes, wipes away strokes and makes more strokes. She starts not with an image in mind but more with a sort of concept. Sometimes a feeling she wants to elicit. This particular painting is meant to elicit joy. 

She didn’t always like abstract art. During her time training as a docent for the Crocker Museum of Art in Sacramento, Calif., she learned how to interpret it. She discovered that it asked questions of her and that she could ask questions of it. 

She became skilled in sharing her newfound appreciation. She would stand with hapless museum visitors, whom she had scooped up from their first hesitant steps into the airy galleries, to show them how to look at the paintings. To really look at them. She shared what questions they could ask of them. 

What is it doing? What is it getting at? 

Now, she stands in her corner of the studio space, looking at her own unfinished painting as if it has the answers to what it should be within it. 

She stands five feet away — far enough to take in the entire large canvas painted with strokes of purples and blacks and oranges, all forming a dialogue of shapes.

She turns to her desk and her palette and begins with a bit of cadmium medium yellow and dioxazine purple. 

The mixture needs something more. 

She adds crimson red and viridian green. Dabbing her brush, she strokes the palette to get the right shade. 

She’s been experimenting with complementary colors, mixing them to get darker shades. She ordered a color wheel because she can’t quite remember them. Purple and yellow? Pink and green? Green and red? 

She’s working on a Bachelor of Fine Arts, taking the free class per semester she gets from being a member of the faculty at Miami. 

Maybe that’s it. 

She holds the palette up to the painting. Not quite. Back to mixing. She adds more mineral spirits to thin it. It needs more yellow. 

When she gave tours at the Crocker, she was still in the middle of her six years practicing law. 

Only when she had opened the sealed letter informing her that she had passed the California bar, one of the two hardest in the country, did she ask herself: What the hell am I going to do with my life? 

She had never actually considered being a lawyer. She went to law school and focused on the most difficult subjects to prove to her parents — and herself — that she was smart. Her legal career plans, though, had only reached as far as passing the bar. 

Maybe that’s it. 

She holds the palette up once more. That’s more like it. 

She sets the palette down and takes quick dabs of the mixture. Then, she steps toward the painting and makes combative strokes. The small brighter spots, which diverge from the grouping of rectangle-adjacent shapes on the left of the painting, receive the darker shade. 

After years in corporate law, floating between jobs and making the rich richer, a friend from church invited her to a painting class. It was there that she remembered she was alive.

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She never thought she was any good at painting. In grade school, when she had to draw or paint something in particular, her teachers told her she was doing it wrong. 

The people teaching the church painting class helped her discover what she was good at. They didn’t pressure her to be good at one art style, and it was there that she had an epiphany — she wanted to pursue art. 

She steps back and takes in what she’s changed. 

It needs something else. 

She mixes more on her palette. The diverging spots fall victim once again to strokes of her curated brown. Oh, yes! That’s it. 

Her sister had gotten sick when Trueblood first became a lawyer. She was at Johns Hopkins Hospital for over a year. Trueblood flew out to sleep on the floor of her sister’s hospital room. 

During the day, they walked up and down the bleak hallways. Her sister, influenced by pain meds, joined her in existential conversations about life and their relationship. 

On one of their walks, Trueblood’s sister asked her to bathe her. She was hesitant, a bit freaked out by the very intimate request. 

As she bathed her sister, she became aware of the importance and the fragility of the pieces of a body. The arms and elbows and hands that make up a life. 

The four large, darker spots touching the left border need more depth, more color. They need to talk to the purple background. She adds brown to the topmost shape. 

Oh, yeah. She makes the long, brown strokes to add an inviting depth to the once-solid black. 

Now, there’s room to come in and feel like you’re a part of it. 

Working in corporate law made her feel like her life lacked meaning. Trueblood wasn’t making a difference there like she knew she was meant to. She’d felt like she was doing more at the Crocker, showing people art. 

The moment with her sister had been transformational. It had prompted her to make a change. A bold stroke.

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 It was then that she discerned a call to ministry. 

She went to seminary, pursuing both a Master of Divinity and a Master of Arts, guided by a passion for using art to connect people.

There, she learned that art is not about being great but about expression and vulnerability. She could finally let go of trying to create great art and just create. 

Maybe some blue. 

She takes a new brush to mix the deep blue that she offers to the painting. Just a little in the corner. 

That works. Maybe all around the shape. 

She spreads it with her brush. It needs some spiffing up. 

As a minister, Trueblood could finally devote herself to her spirituality, creativity and love for community.

She was able to build community as a minister of three different churches. The first was in the Santa Cruz Mountains, where she established a community among outcasts. The second was in Selma, Calif., where she helped merge a wealthy white church with a less wealthy Hispanic church. In the third church, she was a campus minister at the University of California, Berkeley, where she used art projects, music, plays and drum circles to explore creativity and build community. 

Still, something wasn’t quite right. 

She mixes a lighter blue and takes it to the canvas, holding it to the dark blue shape. Where might a highlight go? She paints a right-angle highlight in the top right corner of the shape. 

She gently smooths the bright blue highlight. 

She adds cadmium orange to her palette. A tiny bit of purple? She takes it with her brush and makes daring strokes upon the dark purple spot on the canvas. 

Nope, too much. She wipes some away from the palette with a paper towel and blends the rest. 

She takes a step back and looks at the canvas, searching it. She knew what she wanted her final image to feel like. She just needed to find the strokes that would get her there. 

From an early age, Trueblood had an affinity for self-reflection and a strong self-awareness. She knew who she was and what her life should look like. It wasn’t a perfect image of what she wanted to do but a sort of concept. 

In grade school, she would go on camping trips with her father, a Southern Baptist, where they would fish. They’d pass a bottle of whiskey and a rum-soaked, lumpy cigar between discussions of theology, creationism versus evolution, and other existential topics. He wouldn’t shut down her ideas. He was open to discussing and exploring them. It wasn’t just a kid talking to an adult; they were equals in dialogue. 

In high school, she asked her father to baptize her. But not in a church — in a stream. She wanted to be baptized into the community of humanity rather than a specific denomination. 

She didn’t know what to call it then. She didn’t quite have the word for it. But she always was a Mystic. 

Mysticism is a denominational sect with a deeper emphasis on spirituality. For Trueblood, she seeks to connect with the great consciousness and to be in harmony with other beings and things around her. 

Like with art, asking questions helps Trueblood connect to this consciousness, to people and community. 

Maybe the spots are too different now. They’re not communicating. She adds some brown strokes to the spots. 

“I feel myself getting anxious,” she says to herself. “I gotta slow down. It’s not a race.”

At a community project at the University of North Florida, she made her mysticism public. She decorated her office doors with questions for students to stop and write their answers to. They’d write their religious or secular identity on the sign and stand in front of the doors for a picture.

She stood before those doors and proclaimed her mysticism on her sign. 

They hired her for her ordination as a Methodist minister, but she didn’t necessarily have to stay a Christian. So, she made an intentional move into mysticism. These movements throughout her life, switching from one path to the next, have made her more conscious, more intentional.

She incorporates this into her art. 

Every stroke, color, shape and relationship is intentional. She always asks her paintings the same questions as the abstract art in the Crocker. 

What is it doing? What is it getting at? 

What is the relationship between the foreground and the background? Are they pushing and pulling? Where are the strokes taking you? How are the colors talking to each other? How does the piece make you feel? 

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The piece she is working on was once various shades of brown, but it didn’t elicit joy. It wasn’t inviting. She painted over it with pinks, blues, oranges and greens. 

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She came to dislike those colors too and felt the shapes weren’t communicating. So she painted over it once again. 

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Sometimes, when she makes a daring or radical stroke, she doesn’t think about it. It can be painted over anyway. She can paint more to fix it. Sometimes, maybe it was better the way it was before. But even that worse painting can be fixed. 

Even after she’d put six years into her law career, it didn’t elicit enough joy. So she made an intentional stroke.

When she’d gone to seminary and became a minister, it wasn’t right. So she made another stroke. 

What she’s kept — art, community and mysticism — is mediated by her continuing desire to ask questions, to be more conscious. 

Purple is the mediator of her piece. It runs between all of the shapes and creates depth within them.

She takes a paper towel from her roll and brings it to the canvas. She wipes away layers of paint to reveal more of the purple underneath. 

She wants to reveal more of it within the foreground, to separate it less from the background and prompt dialogue. 

What is it doing? What is it getting at?

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She takes her brush, purple paint already on it, and she adds daring strokes to the orange shape.

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“That’s sweet.”