#watercolorordeath
My own hashtag. Too much? Maybe. But that’s exactly how it feels — like a blood oath with brushes. Same as I feel with the ocean. A d o r e.
People ask, “Isn’t that… intense?” Maybe. But I’d rather be too much for what I love than never enough.
Watercolor is my priest. My mirror. My confessional booth where I slop secrets in cobalt and crimson, where absolution comes not in words but in the way burnt sienna bleeds into ultramarine (divine intervention), creating something I didn’t plan but desperately ought to see.
Oil painters are kings of patience; they command their kingdoms, layering and correcting. Acrylics are soldiers—fast, sharp, obedient.
But watercolor is a hurricane you wade into without armor, and it doesn’t turn. It swallows, then spits you out stained, soaked, redeemed, and wanting more. Like sex at 25.
The pigment steers, the edges blur and pool like they miss the center, like it’s radioactive, as if it’s a black hole, and in that blur is where certitude lives.
Not in the crisp lines we’re taught to worship, but in the soft boundaries where one color becomes another, and you can’t quite name the exact moment of transformation.
That’s where I find God. For Plotinus, he is The One. For me, The One Almighty Watercolor.
Therefore, #watercolorordeath.
It demands surrender and still calls it love. She and I (because, obviously, it’s a she) are lovers of impatience, and we’ve decided it’s an honored trait, not a thing to exorcise. Impatience isn’t recklessness, but urgency made visible. It’s the refusal to wait for perfection’s consent. It’s the shaking hand that knows if it hesitates, the magic will evaporate like water on hot iron.
And, clearly, life is water-soluble. Everything we touch is already dissolving. You think and observe, and there it goes, into the dimensions full of ghosts and plasma and four stages of water. 1
We are all pigment suspended in time, and — can you believe the irony — time doesn’t even exist. Clearly, we are all in a pool of a psych ward, thinking we are princesses of a castle.
I have always lived between chaos and grace, like Her. In that liminal space where the brush is too wet and you think you’ve ruined everything, but then, if you’re brave enough not to fix it, something emerges that’s more honest than anything you could have controlled into being.
That’s where I’ve built my home, in the tension that terrifies and thrills in equal measure.
So, tell me, friend-stranger of the interweb, what is your “or death”?
What’s the thing that possesses you so completely that living without it feels like slow erasure? What makes you feral with devotion? What would you defend with your last breath, before God, The One 2, decides to snatch you out of this delirium called life?
