Spring 2026
By spring, the magpie was still waiting for me.
I'd figured out how to make it. Hardboard, plaster, magnets — no problem. Painting those black feathers was still another story.
So I started painting again to practise.
Not because I'd suddenly decided to become an artist. I still just wanted to figure out the right technique to finish the magpie without ruining it.
At the same time, I was moving out.
And moving meant going through a ridiculous amount of stuff I'd collected over the years. Paint, canvases, tools, leftover DIY materials and all those things I'd kept because I was definitely going to use them someday. Except I hadn't.
There had always been something else. Work. Building something. Fixing something. Another project. Another reason why the things I actually enjoyed could wait.
I realised that I'd spent a lot of time doing things, without necessarily making much room for the parts of myself I actually wanted to explore.
So I made a deal with myself. Anything I hadn't touched in six months had to go. Considering the six months I'd just had, that rule was perhaps a little harsh. It was also most of my stuff.
I did give myself a loophole. If I used it, I didn't have to throw it out.So I started using it.
Paint got opened. Old canvases came back out. Leftover materials became fair game. I started experimenting instead of saving things for whatever future project I'd apparently been keeping them for.
And while I was physically sorting through years of stuff, I was doing a bit of sorting elsewhere too.
At the end of April, I sent my father a letter.
There were things I had wanted to say for a long time. I wasn't sending it to start a fight or to get a particular answer. I just didn't want to keep leaving those things unsaid.
Not long after, we had a family gathering for his birthday. My mum came too, and for the first time in about twenty years my parents sat together again.
Nothing spectacular happened.
Which, in this case, was actually rather spectacular.
During all this, I kept painting.
What had started as practice for one unfinished magpie was turning into other paintings and other ideas. I was getting less worried about whether I knew the right technique and more interested in seeing what happened when I tried something.
I still used the things I already understood: building, cutting, reusing, figuring out how things fit together.
Only now they were finding their way into paintings too.
And somewhere during May, Studio SaSa started to appear.
Not as some carefully planned business or artist identity. I was simply making more, sharing more and needed a place to put it all.
The name came from something much closer to home: SaSa, the name my little sister used to call me.
And the words that started to fit around it were:
Sa binnen, Sa bûten. | So within, so without.
By the end of May, apparently “use the paint or throw it away” wasn't enough anymore, because I started painting and creating with all kinds of stuff that otherwise would've been thrown away.
Getting out of my comfort zone. If it was going to be garbage, I might as well make something with it. No expectations, no restrictions.
It gave me a new sense of freedom and confronted my tendency to overthink almost everything in quite a few ways.
But that was sort of the point. I didn't need to make a masterpiece. I needed to keep showing up, practising and seeing what happened.
The magpie still wasn't finished.
It did eventually become black and white, but the glaze and colours in those feathers — the exact thing I'd started practising for — are still waiting.
But by then, finishing the magpie wasn't really the only point anymore. I'd started with a pile of materials I either had to use or throw away.
So I used them.
And somehow, I ended up with quite a few paintings.
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