Veil of Sand — Beneath the Surface

Veil of Sand original oil painting by Jennifer F, with sweeping ochre desert dunes, layered violet mountains and blue-grey clouds beneath a pale mauve sky.

Veil of Sand began somewhere I wouldn't necessarily have expected a painting to begin.

During a hospital training session, I was asked to choose an image that represented what care should be. There were images of warmth, homes, pathways and gatherings, but my eyes settled on a desert landscape.

It may have seemed an unusual choice, but there was something about its openness that made sense to me.

As a Healthcare Support Worker, I don't think care is always about arriving with answers or being able to change what somebody is facing. Sometimes there isn't an answer we can give, and sometimes we cannot make the difficult part of somebody's journey disappear.

What we can do is listen, observe and meet the person in front of us where they are.

The desert seemed to give me a way of thinking about that.

There was so much space within it. Nothing was telling me exactly where I should look or what I should find there, and I began thinking about how important it can be to leave enough space around another person for us to understand what they actually need rather than arriving with our own assumptions.

That thought stayed with me when I began Veil of Sand.

As the landscape developed, the dunes began overlapping one another, partly concealing whatever lay beyond the next rise. Further away, the mountains softened into the distance and the landscape continued towards them without revealing the whole journey in between.

We can see ahead, but we can't see everything.

I think that uncertainty became an important part of the painting because it is something we encounter so often when caring for somebody. We may not know what happens next. The person we are supporting may not know either, and being there for them doesn't necessarily mean pretending that we do.

Sometimes our role is simply to walk beside them.

As I continued painting, I found myself thinking about how easily we can feel that helping somebody means we should be able to fix something. Yet there are experiences in life that cannot be fixed by another person, however much we might wish they could be.

Illness, grief and uncertainty can all place somebody in a landscape they didn't choose.

We cannot always change that landscape for them, but we can be present within it.

That is what the original desert image helped me understand about my own response to care. I wasn't drawn to it because it felt empty. I was drawn to the space it allowed.

The same thing gradually happened within the painting.

There is plenty to look at in Veil of Sand. The changing colours through the dunes, the violet mountains, the clouds moving across the sky and the small disc of light in the distance are all there, but I didn't want to fill every part of the landscape.

I wanted some of that openness to remain.

Perhaps that is why this painting still makes me think about presence rather than answers. We don't always have to know what lies beyond the next rise in the sand.

Sometimes it is enough to know that we don't have to cross it entirely alone.

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