Tonight I’ve been painting number 210033, “Flower Girl” and thinking about the concept of  ‘fragile’. The subject in that painting is a girl, aged nine or so who is holding a bundle of delicate wild flowers harvested along a summer trail.

The painting itself is fragile. I mean physically so.  It’s cotton canvas stretched tight over wood, susceptable to puncture and tearing. In a fire it would last seconds.

The girl depicted is physically fragile if you consider the light musculature of a child and her diminuative size, consistant with her youth.

That word, “fragile” turned my thoughts to the little fiberglass car on my patio, awaiting renewal after the ravages of time and neglect. Someone in the know called it a potato chip car for it’s delicate build.

I could spend more years reclaiming that glorious machine from decay only to see it destroyed instantly in a simple collision.

I have already spent a very many hours building and refining this painting. Weeks of my life could be stolen away if it were taken by a thief, destroyed by a fire, or put to loss by vandalism. It’s that easy.

And a girl – call her weak or fragile or any of those stature reducing descriptors –  could be lost to disease, or kidnapped, or corrupted, or fall into any number of sad states. At the very least, she’ll grow up.

There will be people who will scoff at my little car and all the time and resources it will get from my life. They’ll judge it a waste. Others will hope I am forced to sell it in desperation so they can get my work for free. 

There will be those who put the worth of a painting at or around nothing and consider the subject boring. Others, me among them, will look at the image and smile. She’s everything that’s right.

We put a lot of time into building weak, fragile things but the irony is that in very many cases, those are the very things that last and that drive us to conquer, and even prevail against impossible odds. 

I’m not so sure any of the fragile things I’ve named actually are. It’s no small thing to accomplish what they prove capable of again and again.

Every little girl could be overpowered by a larger creature. And that creature can be overpowered by a mob. And the mob can be humbled by an army, which can be overwhelmed by war machines, which can be blown away by explosives, whose  combatant forces can be brought to their knees by starvation or sepsis, which can be destroyed by medication.

I think the future is in so called  weak things. They have marvelous powers to bring out the good in the heart and to gladden  souls.