PAINTING LESSONS: For a suicidal young woman who had been sexually abused as a child

There was once a young woman who had been given a beautiful painting of an adolescent girl, bright-eyed and eager as she faced her life and her thrilling future.  But someone had defaced this portrait.  He had painted an evil horrible man in the background, with a gnarled ugly hand across the girl’s face, obscuring her beauty and her pleasure in living.

The young woman did not know what to do with this painting.  It was certainly too ugly to let anyone see.  She thought of throwing it away.  Several times she actually took it to the trash pile.  Once she left it there for three days before retrieving it.

On another occasion, a friend found it on the trash pile, with a couple of holes poked in it.  She took it back to the young woman and suggested she take painting lessons.

The young woman took this advice. She began to learn about colors and pigments, and how to mix them to get desired shades.  She learned about brushes and strokes, and how to move her hands artistically.  She learned about light and shadow, and about perspective and composition. 

When she felt she had learned enough, she took the troubled painting and began to study it very carefully.  Her first reaction was disgust, and then a kind of fright.  It would be easy to feel overwhelmed by the task that lay before her.

But she persevered.  She started by repairing the damage that the canvas had suffered on the trash pile.  Next she bought some paint and brushes, and mixed the pigments very carefully.  She then painted over the evil person and the hand that obscured the face of the young girl.

To her dismay, the dark pigments defining this evil man began seeping through the new paint she had applied.  Try as she might, she could not cover up this malignant influence. 

She was discouraged for a while, but finally decided to try something else.  Very carefully she took a razor blade and started scraping away the pigment that defined the ugliness.

At first, she scraped very tentatively, removing only the surface of the ugliness.  But as time progressed, she scraped more confidently.  Sometimes she would scrape away just a little bit and immediately fill in the area with new pigment to match the girl’s skin.  Sometimes she became impatient.  She scraped so vigorously that she actually removed some of the pigment that defined the young girl.  It left the painting marred and incomplete.

On a couple of occasions, she scraped so hard that she tore the underlying canvas.  But she was so pleased at being rid of the ugliness that she didn’t mind the damage and the necessary repairs.

She would then take her paint and brushes and mix the pigments carefully to get the desired shades, and repair the places that had been damaged.

Finally, she finished.   Her skills as a painter had been imperfect.  The finished product did not look as beautiful as if it had not been damaged.  Instead of a dream-like innocence, there was now a rugged, hardy feel to the painting that was actually very appealing.  She was proud to hang it in her living room.

After she hung it up, she noticed a few dark spots she had missed, and some small areas where the dark pigment still leaked through.  She managed to scrape away a few of the dark flecks with her fingernail, and touched up some of the discolored spots.  But she decided that it would be more trouble than it was worth to try to make it perfect.  She had other things she wanted to do with her time and energy.  She wanted now just to enjoy the painting, and share its beauty and strength with people she loved and who loved her.