Many of our artists are going through intense changes in their lives, and one such artist, Jac Lahav, chose to put to a poetic essay the new trials and tribulations that accopany them. Read on through Jac's perspective on these pivatal moments in not only his life but the changing life of his evolving family.
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The Tasmanian devil is our sons spirit animal - at three years old he is spinning, spitting, and yelling his way through life.
He can often be seen running full-speed into a wall, bouncing back and laughing with glee. This was our second experience parenting and an entirely different journey from our first child, a risk-averse and tightly folded personality, like an origami crane.
Our first patiently builds Lego villages for hours on end; our second destroys them like Godzilla.
After honing our parenting skills with the first child, my partner saw our second as the perfect way to put these lessons to use. “It would be a shame to let all that good training go to waste!” she whispered late at night. I became excited.
With my newfound expertise, a second child would be easy!
Illustration: Pink Taz, 2024
According to Google, the definition of naive is showing a lack of experience, wisdom, or judgment. They must be digitally monitoring my writing because Google says this is how to use naive in a sentence - "the rather naive young man had been totally misled"
Yup, our second child hit me like a ton of bricks and my hard won parenting skills were non-transferable. With the first child, we practiced common sense techniques like: don’t rush to the kids side for small falls, instead stand back and watch them brush it off, they will inevitably continue curiously exploring their world. It worked beautifully, child number one grew optimistic, resilient, and cautious.
Then came the wildfire. Using the same approach did not creating the balance we hoped for. It fed the burning spirit of his boundless independence. After three years we realized this child needed the opposite and we now practice gentle nudges to check in, teaching him that leaning on others brings strength.
Humans crave consistency, and yet these two experience shed light on the unpredicatablity of life. As humans we revel in comfortable habits, layering them upon us like a nest of comforters during the dead of winter. Yet as we jiggle and jostle throught the night, under the weight of these routines and in our well-intentioned repetition, we inevitably will tangle our blankets and find ourselves emmersed in chaos.
Sigmund Freud spoke about this as a “repetition compulsion,” describing how humans desire to relive past behaviors or experiences no matter the consequence.
We recreate beneficial moments (like savoring a delicious meal), while also reliving distressing experiences (like lingering over a harsh argument), both in an attempts to order a chaotic universe.
Artists, like parents, are intimately familiar with the desire to control chaos.
Repetition has a physicality I’ve become acutely aware of in the studio. It feels like dipping a brush into water, rippling endlessly, hoping to still a chaotic surface. My work plays with the palimpsest (an object where new layers cover old). Here the history of its creation becomes integral to the object itself. I layer paint over paint, retracing old gestures. I press my fingertips against drying oils, as if touch reveals what lies beneath.
Painters often call paintings their “babies,” precious little sparks of creativity shepherded into the world. Both parenting and painting involve a strange, unpredictable dance between repetition and growth, where similar actions lead to wildly different outcomes. As a painter and a parent, I find myself immersed in this paradox daily, wondering if I’m shaping my children - and canvases - or if they are shaping me.
Studios smell oily and metallic, undercut by the sweet tang of turpentine. Parenting also has a sensory repetition: the yeasty robustness of bread dough, pushed and pulled, reshaped over and over, often rising unpredictably.
Recently, I began baking challah bread on Fridays to foster a closer relationship with the Jewish Sabbath. After much trial and error I settled on my ideal recipe. Repeating the process should give me the same results, yet the weeks churn, the seasons change, the temperatures shift, and even my palate evolves. As such the recipe too must be adjusted.
Repetition without attention to change leads us into that tangle mess of blankets in the middle of the night. In the studio, this happens when habit dictates process and stifles innovation.
Mindful repetition, however, is an opposite state, and is perhaps even a superpower. Consider brushing your teeth: a mundane, automatic task. Yet pausing to notice the bite of mint and the rhythmic scrape of bristles, the act becomes a meditation.
In the hands of a painter, repetition is transformation. When I step back and let my senses guide me—the tacky pull of drying paint, the glint of light on an unexpected color—I enter a state of “flow”.
Like our child running into a wall full speed, we can become hooked on the adrenaline of the now.
However there is another important variable to take into account. Like my challah recipe, as we age we must integrate the pull of time into this heightened awareness, creating a third axis in our habit matrix. Ten years ago, I approached a painting with the driven determination of a young artist. Today, I see the same canvas differently, both because my techniques have evolved and because I myself have changed. My hands, my eyesight, my relationship to the medium, and my understanding of what I want to say—they all shift. I am no longer parenting my paintings but becoming a grandparent.
Whether raising children or creating art, the lesson is clear: repetition isn’t just a habit, it’s a mirror.
Repetition can be mindful reflection at its best - showing us our growth, our struggles - the palimpsest of our lives told through our actions.
The life of a painter is one of obsession: redoing the same actions, over and over, chasing new visual stimuli. But our truth is deeper. We kindle the same drive a child has to build and rebuild that Lego tower, to run into a wall, get up, and set off running again at full speed. It’s the same instinct that makes us repeat parenting and painting techniques in the hopes of meeting our ever-changing children at the intersection of our experience and their individuality.
Written by Jac Lahav
