Dear friend,
When I was eleven years old, my Aunt Agnes gave me my first set of pastels.
I don't know if she understood what she was doing. I'm not sure it matters. What I know is that something passed between us in that moment — woman to girl, hand to hand — that I have spent my entire life following.
Agnes lived and worked on her own terms. In the era she inhabited, that was not a small thing. She did not explain herself or diminish herself or wait for permission to be who she was. She simply was — without apology a tiny pistol of a woman I admired. And I, at eleven, I wanted to carry what she was packing.
The following year I took her Confirmation name as my own.
Faith.
Faith has been guiding me at every turn.
Every doubt. Every double back. Every moment of wondering whether I was enough, whether the work was enough. When I gave up and restarted, Faith was there in the darkness guiding me one step in front of another. Though I couldn't see her, Faith whispered within.
I am not a late bloomer.
I want to say that clearly, for you as much as for myself.
I am a woman who is just now flourishing fully at 73. There is a difference. The blooming was always coming. It was always on time. It simply required everything that came before it — the listening, the doubting, the long becoming — for her to blossom into the fullness of who she has always been.
I am standing in the wide open meadow now. And I am ready to offer you my heart and hand.
I want to tell you about a painting I delivered at the beginning of the pandemic.
A woman and her husband had commissioned a piece. When it was finished I drove it to their home myself — the way I have always preferred to do it, when I can. I carried it in, we hung it together, and then I left.
As I was walking to my car she called after me.
"Dorothy — I never told you that I am a retired cardiologist."
She paused.
"The title of the painting — 'Blossoming Heart' — means so much to me."
I had not known. I did not choose that title from knowledge of her life or her work or her history. It came the way these things always come — from somewhere beneath knowing, through the listening that happens in the making itself.
Her heart recognised something in the work that my conscious mind had never been told.
There was another time.
I was commissioned to create an award work of art for a person I had never met. My only contact was a single short, cryptic email from the head of the committee presenting it. I made the piece in the blind — following something I could feel but could not name — and shipped it to a convention centre in Washington DC with no further instructions and no expectation of what would follow.
The day before the event I received an email from the organisation's secretary, inviting me to attend the luncheon.
I drove three hours.
My mystery contact turned out to be the retiring founder's closest friend. He stood and presented a poem he had written himself — and it dovetailed so beautifully with the artwork on the stage that I was stunned into stillness.
Then one by one, a full roster of people who had worked alongside the founder stood up and spoke — each with their own words, each somehow embellishing what was already present in the piece, as though the painting had been listening to all of them and holding their words inside it long before they were spoken aloud.
I drove home three hours through the dark, a new woman, with a gift I had not known I possessed.
There is one more story I want to share with you.
A couple had commissioned a painting. When it was finished they was thrilled — completely, genuinely satisfied. I had been paid. The work, by every reasonable measure, was done.
And then something nudged me.
I protested. By this time I was speaking aloud to Faith and I explained to her, carefully and logically, that the painting was complete. That my clients were happy. That there was no professional reason, no rational justification, for what she was asking me to do.
Then Faith spoke plainly, 'your clients are Faith as well, pick up your brush and give them your all.'
In that moment I pivoted. I picked up the brush and painted with Faith, hand in hand, in a way that I never before experienced.
I spoke to my clients together, directly in a video, standing beside The Blessing, Effervescent Love and texted it — not with anxiety, but with the particular quiet certainty of a woman who feels the threshold deeply and trusts.
Their response arrived in unison in less than twenty minutes. "We love it even more, especially the way it came to be, so perfectly!"
She wrote to me that the Creator had gifted me "a heart that hears, feels, and sees His creation" — and that through my hands, others are given the experience of feelings that "fill our heart and cause us to breathe in so deeply, as if to fill our souls."
She signed her letter: "Thank you Faith, for The Blessing of Effervescent Love."
She thanked Faith.
Not Dorothy the artist. Not Dorothy the professional with fifty years of practice.
Faith.
The name Agnes carried. The name I took as my own. The name that has been living underneath everything I have ever made.
She already knew.
I share these stories because I want you to truly understand what you are entering into when you say yes to owning one of my artworks.
This work asks something of both of us.
It asks you to trust what arrives. It asks me to trust what moves through me. I have called this 'flexing my Faith muscle,' as I've painted these fifty years.
I believe that the women who find their way to my art, and the men who accompany them on their journey are flexing Faith within as well.
If you feel called by my art, reach out.
With love and faith,
Dorothy
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