The trouble with creating art for others is that we have to say goodbye to it. Once it leaves our hands, we have no control over how it is used or displayed or interpreted. If we are to reap any sort of public benefit from our work (whether it’s by getting paid or receiving recognition), we do need to let it go. It feels a lot like watching a baby bird leave the nest. Will it soar through the sky and reach new heights, or plummet and die? One can never tell, and we’re helpless to do anything more than watch. Sure, we can try to stay involved in its next phase of life, offer commentary on its meaning or intention, but we can’t really make an audience hear us. The intent belongs to us; the impact belongs to them.

Today, I watched 398 of my baby birds leave my nest.

I’ve been working for many months now on an extended project, in which I was commissioned to facilitate the painting of hundreds of ceramic butterflies for an installation memorializing some of the 1.5 million children who were killed in the Holocaust. (For anyone interested in learning more about the Butterfly Project, a nationwide initiative of which I was proud to take some small part, check their website out here.) I hosted and facilitated over a dozen events in my local Jewish community where we painted dozens upon dozens of these little butterflies. After the events, I brought them back to the art classroom in the school where I teach, because that’s where we have our kiln. I painstakingly glazed every single one of these butterflies with a top coat of weatherproofing glaze, because they’re going into an outdoor installation next spring. I learned something brand-new for this project: how to use a kiln. That was quite a learning curve, and I am to this day still grateful that I’m not blowing up the school! (I said the Shehechiyanu prayer the first time I tried it; that’s a prayer we say at various times, including whenever we do something for the very first time.)

Last week I thought I was finally finished with these butterflies, only to discover 14 more of them at my house. So, I brought that last batch in and glazed them, thinking at least that afternoon they’d go in the kiln and then be done; when I returned to them after school, I noticed I’d missed one during the glazing! They just kept coming up with excuses not to leave me! (And, I’m not done; I have enough unpainted butterflies left over to create a smaller scale display for our school, which is exciting. But, I think I’ll give myself a break from them for a bit!)

I’ve been actively involved in not just the painting of these butterflies, but in the planning of the installation’s execution as well. I came up with the design for how the butterflies would be laid out, sketching out the design that was requested by my director in a way that would be most successful for the space in which it will be placed. I advised on the color and finish of the acrylic background board on which these butterflies will be adhered. The whole display will then be affixed to a brick wall on the exterior of a building, right behind a garden that was thoughtfully planted to be a monarch butterfly waystation; we got that official certificate for it and everything. I’ve also been involved in the planning of the ceremonial program that will take place in the spring when we dedicate the installation. It has been a labor of love — and I do mean labor. This project has been more physical work than I anticipated. But it has been utterly worth it.

And so, today, the people putting it all on the acrylic board came to pick up 398 of these butterflies. I said goodbye and good luck to them, entrusting that they would be well cared for and used for their intended purpose, putting my faith in these designers that my vision would be realized effectively.

I don’t have control over how it will look in the end, because I am not the one physically handling the putting together of the pieces. I struggled for awhile with that before finally accepting that I don’t know how to make art installations fasten to brick walls, and it was best to trust that process to people who do. I had to watch them leave the nest; I can only hope that they will catch the right breeze and truly fly. (The odds are good; they’re butterflies, after all! Ha ha.) Even once this entire finished piece is installed, those who come to see it will have their opinions about it, and I can’t control what people will think or say. But I do know that this mammoth project was conducted with great, pure intentions from start to finish, and for things like this where we’re memorializing murdered children, I think that goes a long way.

Letting go is hard. I get attached to most of my work which makes it difficult to feel comfortable selling my paintings sometimes. The same is often true for writing; any blog post you read here could certainly be misconstrued from what I had intended. I can’t control how you feel about my words. I can only control how I say them. I know what I mean; whether or not you know what I mean is another matter entirely.

To some, like myself, the act of creating art is often freeing, cathartic. Perhaps the trick is to lean in to the freedom the process brings, rather than the loss of control the end result brings. Perhaps that’s really what I mean when I tell my students to focus on process over product.

It is not in our art leaving the nest that we find our wings; it is the process of creating in itself that gives us the power of flight.