THE FINAL CHAPTER: WHERE I MET MYSELF
camryn mclellandThis piece almost didn’t make it into the collection and this isn’t the first time I’ve said that.
Every time I looked at it, I didn’t recognize the person in it. I kept trying to change it, adjusting things over and over, thinking if I just fixed one more part it would finally make sense. But the more I touched it, the more disconnected it felt. The more I started questioning my vision.
Eventually I walked away from it.
Throughout this collection there seems to be a pattern of leaving things unfinished, or maybe just giving myself the time to process before returning.
For months it sat on my wall beside an earlier piece in this collection called Hope. They lived next to each other while everything else in my studio kept shifting around them. Looking back now, it’s funny because those two pieces ended up going in completely different directions, but somehow they were always heading to the same place and ironically enough, right next to each other in the same collection.
At the time, I didn’t understand that.
Every time I passed this painting, I felt frustrated because I thought the painting itself was the problem. But when I finally came back to it, I realized something uncomfortable but honest: the painting wasn’t wrong. I was just trying to force meaning out of something before I was ready to understand it. I knew something was missing, but I couldn’t see it until the timing was more aligned.
Instead of fixing it, I covered the center with a blank piece of canvas and started again.
That moment changed the piece.
Originally the mirrors in this painting were clean. They reflected a version of myself that felt almost too neat, too controlled. When I came back months later, that didn’t feel honest anymore. So I literally took a hammer and shattered the mirror. I broke the glass and embedded those fragments throughout the painting, across the face and within the surface.
The reflections became fractured. Blurry. Imperfect. Real.
There are details in this piece I wish people could see in person. The eye, for example, has a subtle lens layered into it. It’s small, but it matters, because this painting isn’t about suddenly seeing everything clearly. It’s about perspective changing and realizing that sometimes the world around you doesn’t change, only the way you see it does.
Even the background reflects that moment in time. Earlier pieces in this collection are full of bold color and movement, but this one is much more muted. At the time I created it, I didn’t have the same clarity yet. My thoughts were quieter, heavier, more uncertain. The colors reflect that space. Later in the collection, I noticed a few more pieces became muted as well. Maybe I carried my original familiarity with this piece into those without even realizing it.
But what makes this piece especially meaningful to me is the way it holds experimentation.
Before this collection, I had never worked with anything besides watercolor. I was learning everything as I went. I had notes written down from the most random discoveries and things that seem obvious now, like realizing you can’t put acrylics over oils. At the time, I genuinely didn’t know. I thought paint was just paint.
This painting became a place where I started exploring everything.
There are oil pastels worked into the surface. Matte textures against glossy rain. Thick areas of paint sitting next to softer, blended spaces. It was the first time I really allowed myself to explore what art could do rather than trying to control what it looked like.
There are also materials in this piece that carry meaning from the rest of the collection.
Fire, cliffs, and elements of the sky appear in different forms throughout many of these paintings. It’s been what I’m drawn to recently. They’re symbols of intensity, height, perspective, and openness. They often show up abstractly, like clouds or atmosphere woven into the background.
And then there’s the yarn.
You’ll see small strands worked into the painting, almost quietly sitting within the surface. That yarn was originally meant for a completely different piece that I couldn’t make sense of at the time. I had set it aside like another unfinished idea.
But eventually I realized it belonged here.
Because yarn, to me, always represented unraveling things. Pulling apart the threads of experiences, memories, and questions to understand what they’re made of. And sometimes when you unravel something, it doesn’t fall apart, it reveals the structure underneath it.
Interestingly enough, my very first complete painting was called Unraveled. It’s funny how full circle that feels now, seeing literal strands of yarn show up again here. That piece isn’t included in this collection, though. It deserved its own space entirely. In a lot of ways, it sits outside of this body of work. It belongs to a different moment, a different realization.
But somehow the thread of it still found its way here.
This piece became a place where all of those discoveries started meeting each other, technically as an artist, and personally as a human.
When I look back through this collection, none of the paintings look the same. The styles shift. The colors change. The techniques evolve.
For a while I used to criticize myself for that. I thought maybe I didn’t have a voice yet. I worried people wouldn’t recognize my work because it didn’t look consistent. I was insecure at one point even putting these pieces next to each other because of how different they all were.
But now I understand.
These paintings look different because I was different while creating them. Each one reflects a real moment of learning, questioning, rebuilding, and growing. They hold the parts of me that were scared, the parts of me that were curious, the darker places I had to face, and the unexpected moments where I found joy again.
Where I Met Myself holds all of that at once.
It isn’t just the title of this painting. It’s the realization that came from everything in this collection, that through all the confusion, loneliness, questions, and rebuilding, I was slowly learning how to sit with myself long enough to recognize who I actually am.
For a long time, being alone felt like something painful. Like something was missing.
But somewhere along the way, that started to change. I began to understand that solitude doesn’t always mean emptiness. Sometimes it means space, space to create, to think, to heal, and to grow in ways that no one else can see yet.
And the truth is, there were moments during this season where I genuinely didn’t think I would make it to this chapter or to this exact page.
But I did.
And if there is anything I hope someone feels when they stand in front of this piece, it’s this: life doesn’t always ask us to have everything figured out. Sometimes it just asks us to keep going. Standing, sitting, crawling, whatever that looks like.
Because if you’re still here, you’re still growing.
A while ago I wrote the words, “To discover joy is to learn how to live twice.”
At the time, I thought I understood what that meant.
I didn’t.
Because discovering joy isn’t about returning to the life you once had. It’s about learning how to build a new one after everything you thought defined you has changed.
And somewhere in the middle of learning how to do that…
I realized something I hadn’t understood before.
The person I had been searching for this entire time
was the one standing here all along.
