Undergraduate / Watercolor Painting - "Demonstrate Your Character" - UW Essay [4]

I need help with a conclusion, like majorly. Feedback in general would be great!!!!

As the sun's rays strike her, a faint ebb of purple spreads throughout her wings and a shimmer of blue pulses across her body. Miniscule and fragile, I hold my breath as I reach towards the creature. She seems to ripple as I approach, the light refracting off her glistening body. We are mere inches away from one another. Centimeters now. Millimeters. Closer and closer, until no space remains. As we touch, her whole body quakes and vibrates. My breath catches, and then it's all over. The butterfly stills, and she is mine now. My paintbrush holds her in place - not to capture, but to set free. I arc my stroke upwards, filling in the last curve of her wings. Bound by nothing but the edges of my canvas, I watch my creation fly as I pull away.

Everything I am can be found here: resting on top of an easel, sprawling across a canvas, stemming from a paintbrush, pooling in a swirling eddy of color. I paint when I am happy. I paint when I am sad. I paint when I am lost, seeking answers among the pigments to questions I cannot answer in real life. Who I am is found in these creations, these paintings, these fragments of my soul.

Sometimes I take out my watercolors and cry, my salty tears mingling with the colored drops upon the canvas until I can no longer tell them apart. I have cried with the despair of an eight year old child when my mother showed me the divorce papers. I have cried with the fear of a runner who could not run for three months when I was rushed to the emergency room two years ago for a ruptured ovarian cyst. And I have cried with the sheer frustration of my inability to convince a friend that my religious beliefs are as valid as his. Over my canvas I can cry and let my tears swirl away in a world of technicolor dreams and happy endings.

Sometimes I pick up my paintbrush in search of clarity; as I paint, my brush becomes an extension of my mind, letting my ideas wander across the canvas alongside my strokes. I'll be mixing burnt umber and sienna as I work on my political stance for Togo in Model UN, or watching green streaks race down my canvas as I ponder the practicality of using a heel hook when rock climbing, or adding a purple wash to a sunset when a complex physics theory finally registers with me. My science teachers would be amazed if they ever discovered how many of my research projects originated from behind the canvas. Painting gives me the chance to catch and develop any thoughts that drift through my head before they flit away like butterflies and vanish like the flashes of fireflies.

Sometimes I grasp at my easel, clutching the old wooden frame, feeling the groves and pocks of the worn-out material, gasping for air. When everything else in my life - my family, my home, my future - has proven transient and temporary, my paintings have remained. From the three minute thumbnails churned out hastily on top of Longs Peak, Colorado, where I felt at ease and unstoppable, to the incomplete self-portraits started and abandoned in the corner of my bedroom, where the sounds of my mother's tears echoed through the walls, my watercolors have always been there to inspire, encourage, and comfort me. Even after I temporarily cast aside my canvas and threw away my brushes, defying the "artist" label I had been confined to at school, my paints remained patiently and silently awaiting my return.

Painting, from the easel to the canvas to the brush, taught me what it feels like to live with fervor, setting out sometimes without direction or purpose to follow the currents of my heart. Painting taught me to express, to explore, to learn; to dance through life as I dance across the canvas.