The Art of Making from the Floor

My studio floor is a wild tangle of brushes, paint tubes, scraps of paper, and broken pastels. To anyone else, it might look like disorder, an unkept corner of life that should be tidied away. But to me, it is sacred ground. It’s here, on this floor, that I do most of my work. Not at a tall easel, as many might picture an artist, but down low, where my body’s limitations have brought me. Neurological damage has changed the way I move and work, but not the way I create. This floor has become both my boundary and my canvas ~ the place where creativity meets surrender, and where something luminous is born out of chaos.

The Myth of Order

When people imagine an artist’s studio, they often picture bright light streaming through tall windows, canvases standing proud against the wall, and shelves neatly stacked with jars of brushes and rows of tidy paint tubes. There’s a certain romance to that image, but for me and for many working artists I know that’s a myth. Creativity rarely unfolds in neat rows and spotless surfaces.

Art grows wild. It spills over edges, it resists tidy boxes, it scatters itself in unexpected ways. My studio floor bears the truth of that: paint-stained cloth, jars clouded with murky water, half-used tubes of color, chalk dust clinging to my fingers, and shards of pastel crumbling under hand. It’s a picture of life lived fully in the making, not in the cleaning.

Chaos as Fertile Ground

There’s something mysterious about chaos. At first glance, it looks like confusion, waste, or even failure. But chaos, in its truest form, is possibility. It is the raw material of creation.

Think of how a broken pastel opens up a softer side, a wider surface to press color more deeply into the page. Think of how mixing colors that were never meant to meet can suddenly produce a shade you didn’t know you needed. Think of how mistakes, smudges, drips, lines gone astray sometimes turn into the very thing that makes a piece sing.

This is the lesson of the floor: beauty is not born from perfect order, but from willing engagement with the mess. The artist’s task is not to eliminate chaos, but to enter it, work with it, and allow something new to emerge.

The Hidden Work Behind the Canvas

Every finished painting carries within it countless unseen beginnings. There are sketches that never made it past the first strokes, palettes of dried paint that never found a canvas, experiments abandoned halfway through. This floor has seen them all.

What often hangs on the wall or is shared with the world is the fruit of long hours of unseen labor hours spent on my stomach or on my knees, hands smudged, mind wrestling between frustration and wonder. It is easy for someone to admire the polished result without realising the depth of work that lies beneath it. But it’s here, in the half finished attempts and the failed experiments scattered across the floor, that the real work of art is forged.

Art, like life, is not built in straight lines but in layers. It grows through trial, error, risk, and return. It asks for presence more than perfection.

Living Close to the Ground

Because of my illness, I’ve had to adjust the way I live and work. The floor has become my closest companion in art making. Some days, it feels humbling, even frustrating, to be limited in what my body can do. And yet, there is a strange grace in it.

Living close to the ground has taught me to see differently. It has slowed me, rooted me, demanded that I pay attention to the small details, the way light hits a crumpled piece of paper, the curve of a broken brush, the texture of paint, pastel or perhaps pencil has ground into the mat. From down here, I’ve discovered a new intimacy with the process, a new reverence for beginnings that look like mess but are really seeds.

Limitations have become, in a way, a teacher. They remind me that art is not about control or mastery, but about openness, about letting creation unfold in the space between what I hoped for and what I am given.

Faith in the Middle of Mess

My faith has been woven through this journey. I can’t look at my floor without thinking of the way God works, not by erasing the mess of our lives, but by entering it with us. The incarnation itself is a story of coming low, of stooping down into the dust of human life to bring forth something new.

Just as my studio floor holds the scattered fragments of my making, I believe God holds the fragments of our lives. Nothing is wasted. The broken pieces, the failed attempts, the moments that feel like chaos all of them can become part of a greater story when placed in the hands of love.

The Invitation of the Floor

So when I look at my messy floor, I don’t see failure. I see invitation. I see a reminder that life, like art, is not made by avoiding chaos, but by moving through it. That beauty is not sterile or spotless it is layered, lived in, messy, and most of all alive.

To anyone standing outside, this floor might look overwhelming. But from within it, I see possibility, resilience, faith, and grace. I see the ongoing miracle of creation itself.

And I wonder if perhaps this is true for you, too. Maybe your own life feels messy right now broken pieces scattered across the ground, unfinished attempts lying in plain view. Maybe you’ve been taught to tidy it up, to hide the chaos, to only show the polished outcome.

But what if the mess is where the beauty is already taking root? What if the floor you find yourself on is not the end of your story, but the very ground where something luminous is about to be born?

xox