I just dropped my muse off at college.

This is the first painting I made of my daughter. My irritated reaction to the piles of tiny, pink things I had been so generously given at various baby showers.

This painting was probably next. More pink and a slight reflection of the light hitting her bald head, a baldness that resulted in many well-meaning, older women on the subway advising me to pierce her ears so that people would know she was a girl.

That first year August stayed still long enough for me to paint her in real time only because sleeping was her full time job. But the exuberance kicked in before her first birthday and I had to paint her from photographs. She grew into the kind of kid who had a ‘handstand phase’. She likes to dance and is a solid first baser. But her energy exists in tandem with the ability to lounge around; she happily spends hours in her bed with the Gilmore Girls and The Sims.

She is oriented towards happiness and play and is excited by everything from Dairy Queen Blizzards to brunch to puppy sightings. In class she was the girl repeatedly raising her hand. She definitely demanded to be in charge of any small group and I’m sure the other kids grew annoyed by her constantly reclaiming her time. Sometimes, like in this portrait, I captured her intensity.

But this is no Tracy Flick we’re talking about here. She is not some stringent perfectionist forcing her will on others. She easily convinces people to have fun with her. She’s on a permanent charm offensive. She promises a good time and then delivers on that promise.

My iPhoto overflows with videos that she and her friends made of fake cooking shows, slapstick dance routines, dog training informercials, bake sales, softball games, robotic competitions, dance recitals. I have a video record of a child born to do things well and make friends easily. And since we dropped her off at college a month ago, I watch those videos ways too much. I’m very pathetic about it, actually.

But if I had all of those photos and videos of my daughter all these years why was I compelled to also capture her in paint? Why did I turn this poor kid into my muse?

These two methods of archiving her life are apples and oranges. There is a difference between this massive iPhoto slog and the stacks of paper and canvases with my daughter’s painted image on them that fill my house. One is a digital scrapbook of visual memorabilia, a warehouse of memory triggers. The other is more aligned with a hoarding of her soul and my desperation to stop time. So, of course, the paintings are way worse, way more intrusive, way more pathetic.

We left her in a dorm room on the outskirts of Philadelphia just 30 days ago but August’s absence grows more concrete every day. I hate that I’m left with all of these paintings that I now realize were a desperate attempt on my part to know her better. As Alice Neel, one of the greatest portrait painters, said, “Like Chekhov, I am a collector of souls…if I hadn’t been an artists, I would have been a psychiatrist.”

There is also in these paintings the desire to capture her as the child I knew back when I was her entire world. A painting of a child is of a bug in amber, their need for us suspended in time.

She is now two months into adulthood. She has a new home and a totally separate world that from now on I will only catch glimpses of, forget about being the center of it. And those glimpses will happen on her terms. The power shift is swift and brutal and any paintings I make of her moving forward will be a result of her deciding what part of her new life I am allowed to see well enough to paint.

Why didn’t anybody warn me that this would happen? That along with her physical absence would come a shrinking of the window into her world.

So, am I supposed to keep painting her? Was her dependency part of the artist/muse relationship and that relationships is null and void when she goes off on her own? Or, as I think is my new plan, should I focus all of my attention on her 13-year-old brother? I’ve done countless paintings of him already, and he’s stuck with us for another 5 years. So I think I’ll make the most of it and grapple with a separate set of questions related to painting him down the road.

I suspect they were never true portraits of August anyway. Maybe it was all about the painter, not the paintee.

Dora Maar said of her seemingly terrible role as Picasso’s muse, a role that overshadowed her role as a leader in the surrealist movement, “All his portraits of me are lies. They're all Picassos. Not one is Dora Maar.”

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When I was looking through my paintings of August I realized that a lot of the paintings of her capture her walking away from me, heading out, going somewhere that is definitely not my house.

Now she has walked away from her childhood in my house and taken her orientation to fun and her energy with her. I fully understand what a gift it is to have your child leave in this natural, peaceful way. But I am thinking about this absence none the less. I am now living in a house where that kind of powerful energy has left and it so quiet and empty. Maybe I should just do a painting of silence and emptiness. Hi, Rothko.

August was born under a full moon and in the middle of a huge thunderstorm and she came out in the final 20 minutes of her due date. She emerged strangely calm, not crying, her eyes were open, her energy already so intense. Maybe the canvas was always going to be too limited to capture all of her energy anyway.

Happy Painting - kind of.

xo Sara