Fear Has a Bad Reputation It Doesn't Entirely Deserve

My meditation teacher described the body as one of those old coal trains.

Through the meadows, the pace stays steady. The crew shovels at a comfortable rhythm. But when there is a mountain in the distance, they cannot wait until you are already climbing to start loading more coal. They have to begin building power long before the incline appears. If they wait, you stall on the hill.

I sat with that image for a long time.

Because what it suggested was that the tingle in my belly that I had spent most of my life labeling fear might not be a warning at all. It might be my body loading coal for something it already knew was coming. Something new. Something I had never done before.

I began testing the idea. Instead of treating the feeling as a signal to stop, I started treating it as a signal to keep going. Something in me was already preparing. My job was to trust the preparation.

It changed what I thought I was capable of.

Gathering Power was painted after a trip to Lake Michigan, a place I visited known since childhood. There is a particular ease that comes from a landscape that remembers you before you remember yourself. The water was the same water. The light moved the same way it always had. I was grieving and the lake didn't require anything from me in return.

I wanted to bring that ease back with me.

The painting eventually hung in the cafeteria of the Old Brewery Mission in Montreal for two months. The organisation works with the city's homeless population. I wanted to put peace somewhere it was genuinely needed, to make it visible and leave it in a room where people eat their meals and rest and try to gather themselves for what comes next.

The turquoise field is built in layers. Greens and blues laid over each other until the depth became atmospheric, the kind of blue that carries weather inside it. The orange mass in the upper left is the most physically active area of the canvas, dense and impasto in the darkest strokes, earlier layers showing through where the paint thins at the edges.

The drips that run through the composition are intentional and structurally significant. The canvas was turned multiple times during the painting process. What reads as drips climbing rather than falling is accurate. Gravity pulled them in one direction, and then the canvas turned, and gravity pulled again. The surface records movement through time, not a single frozen moment.

The circular mark beneath the orange mass holds the energy above it. A contained arc. Not releasing, not dispersing. Grounding.

The painting's formal argument is about accumulation and readiness. Power building before the mountain appears.

Gathering Power was later placed in the Solar Plexus room of the Human Design Hotel project in Montreal, a space designed to allow all emotions to be fully felt. In that context the turquoise field did what it was always made to do. It brought stillness to a room that had been built to hold everything.

From the artist's journal: "If we think of our emotions as energy, perhaps that tingle in our bellies that we feel and label fear is actually a boost of energy preparing us to do something we have never done before. Perhaps we are gathering power to climb and grow and expand. I began using that feeling of fear in my belly as a signal to keep going and to acknowledge that something new was coming. I began to use that power to do the things I hadn't thought that I was capable of."

From the Serenity collection, 2022. Available at margaretlipsey.com.