Tranquillité

I’ve always had a love-hate relationship with the summer. As a kid, I loved it. No school, my birthday, days spent reading by the pool, family vacations, camping. And while I do still love those things, the heat now takes a toll on me that it never used to (although, maybe that’s the perfect shit-storm-soup of SSRIs and perimenopause).

But regardless of your love or hate of summer, there’s no denying there’s a certain beauty about the heavy stillness, the evening light, the blanket of warmth wrapped around your bare shoulders. It’s the middle of July now, and the light has been doing that thing lately where it goes long and gold around eight and everything in the house turns the color of a held breath.

And the best place in the house for that gorgeous afternoon light is my studio.

There’s a small group of original oil paintings I made a while back hanging on one wall, part of a collection called Tranquillité. They’re little ones, thick with paint, framed in heavy walnut. With names like Summer Dusk, Riverbed, Tempest, Reverence, and Olive Grove, they’re some of the best painting I’ve done and the perfect ode to summer. But when they didn’t immediately sell at release three years ago, I removed them from my website and honestly sort of forgot about them.

Until now.

Not because of some ground-breaking, identity-defining story - a lot of my work comes intuitively, spilling from my hands unannounced. I usually don’t even attach meaning to it until afterwards, and it’s uncanny how accurate it usually is.

Side note: Most of the time I don’t explain the true meaning of a piece I’ve painted to the public. I have my own emotional attachment to it, and the person the ends up collecting it no doubt does, as well. That’s the beauty of abstract pieces - they allow for so many different interpretations and meanings depending on the viewer, and I will never take that journey of meaning-making away from others.

The pieces are gorgeous, with earthy shades of green, ivory, mustard, and blue-gray melding to create a unique texture that catches the light differently depending on where you stand and when. They’re framed in solid walnut frames, heavy but not obtrusive. Somehow each piece feels like, well, a part of summer - warm and beautiful and heavy and nostalgic.

At eight by ten inches, they’re the perfect size to sit on a shelf or hang in a quiet nook, perfectly at home by itself or in a gallery wall with others.

The only reason I hesitated to re-release these was that they don’t really fit my style today, or fit what Double Kick is becoming. The work I’m making now is darker and more severe, and these are much softer than that. They’re a relic of a past version of myself. (Isn’t that what art is, though, when you really think about it? But that’s another essay…) And I thought that somehow releasing them again would muddy the story I’m telling about who I am now.

Which, when I write it down, is a genuinely stupid way to treat a beautiful thing.

Because moving past something creatively doesn’t make it worthless. They’re not lesser because I’ve evolved, they’re stunning in their own right. The paint does something with evening light that I couldn’t replicate now if I tried, because I’m not the person who made them anymore. And pieces like that shouldn’t live in storage protecting my arbitrary idea of consistency. It should be on someone else’s wall, catching their evening o’clock light.

Shop the Tranquillité collection here.

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Sara
Founder & Creative Director, Double Kick