One Day I May Sell My Art (Again)

I used to sell my art, years ago now, before my life took the shape it has today, when time felt more elastic and my days were quieter in ways I did not yet understand I would someday miss, and it began in the simplest, most unassuming way, with Christmas cards painted by hand for friends and family, small watercolors meant only as gestures of care, never intended to become anything more than that.

But people noticed, and they responded, and what started as something intimate and personal slowly widened into something I hadn’t yet imagined, as I began creating individually hand-painted watercolor greeting cards, each one slightly different, each one carrying the marks of time, pressure, and attention, and before long they were being sold in various shops, received well, asked for again, until the demand reached a point where I could no longer keep up by hand alone.

That was when the questions began, not creative ones, but practical ones…how to scale something without hollowing it out, how to reproduce work without stripping it of the very qualities that made it special in the first place, how to keep something feeling bespoke and considered in a world that so often rewards speed, volume, and sameness, and it took time to figure out how quality could be protected without turning the work into something disposable or impersonal, something that felt closer to fast fashion than to art.

While I was navigating that tension, requests began to come in for large-scale watercolor paintings, and this was where I hesitated, where doubt crept in quietly, not loud or dramatic but persistent, because entering that space, committing to work that large, that visible, that permanent, required a level of belief in myself that I wasn’t sure I fully possessed yet, and even though the opportunity was there, I felt unsure, exposed, and afraid of being seen too clearly.

Still, I did it.

I painted five large pieces, each one demanding more of me than the last, not just technically but emotionally, because watercolor does not allow for detachment or half-attention, and when they were finished and received with warmth and affirmation, when the response was generous and encouraging, I felt something open, not confidence exactly, but possibility.

I wanted to continue.
And I would have.

But life intervened, not harshly, not destructively, but in the most necessary and transformative way possible, because motherhood arrived, and with it a complete reordering of my time, my energy, and my sense of priority, and suddenly the kind of sustained solitude and concentration that watercolor requires became rare, almost impossible to access without cost.

Watercolor is not something that can be picked up in fragments.
It asks for hours.
It asks for presence.
It asks for a kind of mental and emotional immersion that motherhood, especially in its earliest years, demands tenfold.

And so I paused.

Not because I stopped loving art, not because the desire left, but because there are seasons in life when attention must be given elsewhere, fully and without resentment, and this was one of them, a season that asked me to pour myself into something living, growing, and endlessly requiring, something that mattered more than output or momentum.

Now, I hold the idea of returning to selling my art gently, without timelines or pressure, without the need to prove anything, knowing that one day, when time loosens again, when my hands and mind are freer, I may return to it with a deeper sense of self, a clearer understanding of what I am willing to give, and what I am not.

This is not an announcement.
It is a knowing.

Art has never left me.
It has simply been waiting, the way meaningful things often do, for the right moment to be held again.