Creative Courage: Discovering What Was Already There

I did something recently that I've never done before. I took one of my old paintings, put it back on my easel, and started painting into it.

I thought I was reworking an old canvas. I didn't expect it to make me look at life differently.

Not touching up a spot or trying to restore it. I began painting over some areas, keeping others, and seeing what might emerge from what was already there.

The original was an abstract acrylic called In the Midst. I painted it seven years ago, when I had only been painting for about three years.

And it looked like it. 😂

There was tons of texture, some of it pretty random. My skills were still developing and I was experimenting with just about everything.

But I knew why I wanted to paint.

I wanted to somehow make visible what I was experiencing with God—encounter, intimacy, revelation, and glory. I knew what I wanted my art to carry long before I had the skills to pull it off.

Which is probably why my art teacher at the time nicknamed me Creatively Courageous Claudia.

I was willing to try––so willing to learn that I went to art classes for homeschooled middle schoolers!

There I was, the grown woman in the room, learning right alongside them. 😂

Although intimidated, I didn't particularly care what it looked like. I wanted to learn how to paint.

Seven years later, creative courage looked a little different.

My art coach encouraged me to go through older work that no longer represented where I am as an artist. Sell it, donate it, paint over it—just don't keep presenting something because you once made it.

That's how In the Midst ended up back on my easel.

I thought about gessoing over it.

But instead, I found myself working INTO it.

The old painting began turning into a huge cliff with a waterfall. The sky changed. Light appeared. Some areas disappeared altogether while others became part of the new landscape.

And all that random texture I put there seven years ago?

Turns out some of it is exactly what this painting needed.

I've started calling the new painting Glory Falls.

And that's when this became about more than rescuing an old canvas.

Because I started thinking about how quickly we're willing to dismiss things from earlier seasons of our lives.

Sometimes rightly so.

We've all outgrown things. We've made choices we wouldn't make now. We've believed things we've since reconsidered. Hopefully we're not the same people we were seven years ago.

But that doesn't mean you have to throw away everything from an earlier season.

Some of it may simply need to be seen differently.

You may have learned something during a season you thought was wasted that you need now. There may be a dream you set aside because you didn't have the skill, money, confidence, or opportunity to do anything with it then.

Something you tried and weren't particularly good at.

A relationship that taught you something.

A failure that changed you.

Even an idea that seemed a little random at the time.

We don't always know what will matter later.

I certainly didn't stand in front of In the Midst seven years ago thinking, I'd better put this texture here because I'm going to need it for a waterfall in 2026. 😂

I was simply working with what I knew then.

Now I know more.

And I think that's one of the gifts of growing—not just growing as an artist, but as a person and with God.

We get to look again.

Not to live in the past or try to recreate it, but to see it with the eyes we have now.

What still belongs?

What doesn't?

What have I learned?

What did God put there that I couldn't recognize at the time?

And what could He do with it now?

I don't think growth always requires a blank canvas.

Sometimes the invitation may be to courageously paint into what's already there.

That's certainly what happened with Glory Falls.

It's becoming a very different painting from In the Midst, but the old painting hasn't disappeared. Its history is literally underneath the new work, and in some places you can still see it.

That makes this original particularly interesting to me.

Whoever eventually owns Glory Falls won't simply own the image of a waterfall. They'll own a painting with seven years of history physically embedded in it—an early work and a current work existing on the same canvas.

I love that.

I'm not showing you the entire finished painting quite yet. I'm setting up a new space where I can properly photograph my originals, and I want Glory Falls to have its moment when I can show you what it really looks like.

For now, I'll show you In the Midst. When I can properly photograph Glory Falls, I'll show you what became of it.

And while you're looking, perhaps there's something in your own life worth looking at again.

Not necessarily to preserve it.

Not necessarily to throw it away.

Just to see what might still be there.

What an Original Painting Carries | Claudia Klann Fine Art

https://video.wixstatic.com/video/6541a4_568b553f96324b0cbe19ff1eb489c257/1080p/mp4/file.mp4

I sell prints of my paintings, and I love that my work can be reproduced.

Actually, reproductions have allowed my art to travel much farther than I ever could.

A painting that began on an easel in my studio in Redding can become a print hanging in someone’s home across the country, or a greeting card that travels to another part of the world. I’ve had missionaries use my greeting cards with people who haven’t met Jesus yet.

Think about that. Something I painted here in my studio can end up halfway around the world, in the hands of someone I’ve never met, and become part of how someone else shares the love of Jesus.

I really love that.

So when I talk about the importance of owning original art, I’m not diminishing prints or reproductions at all. They’ve allowed what I create to go places the original painting—and I—may never go.

But an original is different. It just is.

If you’ve ever stood in front of an original oil painting, you probably know what I mean. Oil paint does something with light that’s very hard to capture in a photograph. I paint in layers, sometimes transparent, sometimes opaque, and there are brushstrokes and ridges and texture across the surface.

Put that painting in a room with natural light and it will change throughout the day. The light comes through the window and catches a brushstroke or a ridge of paint. It moves through a transparent layer and reflects back through the color. Walk past it from another direction and you may see something you didn’t see an hour ago.

That’s one of the things I love about oil.

But the physical qualities of the paint are only part of what an original painting carries.

And there’s something about that that feels very familiar to me because, as a believer in Jesus, I am also meant to reflect light—His light.

I bring who I am to the canvas. I bring what God has put in me, what He’s shown me, encounters I’ve had with Him, joy, hope, beauty, and also the things I’ve walked through with Him that weren’t particularly beautiful while I was living them.

How could I not bring all of that?

I pray while I paint. I worship. I talk to Jesus. Sometimes I listen. Sometimes I have a pretty clear idea of what I’m trying to express, and sometimes I’m frustrated because the painting is absolutely NOT doing what I want it to do. 😂

But I’m creating out of who I am and what I carry, and I believe that gets released into the work.

I believe original art can actually change the atmosphere of a room. I’m comfortable talking about energy and frequency because I believe what we carry matters. What we give our attention to matters, and what we release through our creativity matters. When I create in relationship with Jesus, I believe His presence, His light and His glory affect what I create.

So I’ve been thinking about something we don’t talk about very much when we buy art: Who is the artist?

I don’t mean how famous they are, how many shows they’ve done or what their résumé looks like. I mean, what do they carry? What are they releasing through their work?

We put a lot of thought into how something will look in our homes. Will it work over the sofa? Is it the right size? Does it go with the rug? Of course those things matter.

But I also care about what I’m bringing into my home. I care about the atmosphere of the place where I live, where people gather, where I wake up in the morning and where ordinary life happens.

I think the art we choose becomes part of that atmosphere.

That’s certainly part of why I paint.

I want my paintings to carry light, beauty, hope, peace and glory. I want them to make room for encounter. Not everything I paint looks overtly Christian, and I don’t think it needs to.

I carry Him. So naturally, He comes with me to the canvas.

And that brings me back to the difference between an original and a reproduction.

A reproduction can take the image farther than the original ever could, which is one of the reasons I’m so grateful for them. But there is only one original canvas that I actually stood in front of.

Those are the marks my hand made. Those are the layers I put down, wiped off, changed, covered up and sometimes uncovered again. It was there for the whole messy process of figuring out what I was trying to say.

I prayed over that canvas. I spent hours with it. I created it with intention, and I believe something of that intention and atmosphere remains with the work.

Maybe that’s part of why selling an original can be bittersweet for me. Of course I want to sell my paintings. This is what I do, and there’s something wonderful about another person loving a painting enough to want to live with it.

But I’ve lived with it first.

Then one day someone carries it out of my studio and it becomes part of their home and their life.

I like thinking about where it will hang. The conversations that will happen around it. The ordinary days when no one is paying much attention to it at all, and then one morning the light will come through the window differently and they’ll notice something in it they hadn’t noticed before.

And I hope over time the painting continues to give something to the room and the people who live there. I hope it brings peace or joy or hope. I hope sometimes it causes someone to become more aware of the presence of God.

The same oil paint that caught the light in my studio will now catch the light coming through someone else’s windows and reflect it into their room.

And in a very real way, that’s what I was trying to do when I painted it in the first place.