"The little pictures a peasant paints on the walls of his house to beautify it are of more value to know the soul of a people than the pictures in art galleries.”
Welcome!
I’m Jonalyn Fincher, author and painter.
Here you’ll find me using words and watercolor
to tell the stories of healing, beauty, and friendship.
Since publishing my books over 10 years ago, I have continued to write. These thoughts are recorded in the private and unpublished database of my journals. Ten years ago, with my Ruby Slippers book and blog, I wrote to figure out what I as a young woman thought. Now, I’m writing to share the crops I’ve been cultivating for the last decade. I am no longer interested in wrestling publicly with my own healing. But I am very interested to find anyone else interested in beauty, healing and friendship. I want to find you, to share some of the bumper years with you. I think sharing will help us all grow in confidence in a forgotten truth: The Spirit of God grows each of us, especially in what appear to be quiet or even silent years.
I can remember the beautiful moments.
When I was five, my grandmother took me to the Los Angeles Museum of Art. I remember standing in front of a painting 20 times bigger than me and wishing I could hold all it said. I remember my Mexican grandparents sitting with me over long meals, buckwheat pancakes with the faintest drizzle of real maple syrup. The way the moon would rise so close to me when I climbed the pine tree in our backyard. These beautiful memories customized by the Master of Ceremonies to rescue me.
Beauty has come in riffs and whiffs from the good country of God all through my life. And watercolor is one of His calls.
Watercolor rewards characteristics I haven’t always wanted: sensitivity, planning ahead, diligence, curiosity. It’s a traveling medium and one that has grown rather than silenced my sensitivity to notice. Beauty awakens, clarifies and frees me, still. Join me here to see.
I’ve wanted to write about friendship for a decade. And I don’t think it would be an overstatement to admit: Friendship has unlocked every meaningful moment in my life. I am a friend to my husband, Dale, not just a wife. It’s how we have created a family culture that is better than any movie or novel, not because it’s smooth or perfect, but because it nurtures our differences and grows our similarities. Friendship has transformed my children from offspring, projects or puzzles into companions. Friendship is the only relationship we can choose, intentional beyond any bonds of blood or career. Friendship is what will endure once this world goes to hell in a hand basket.
Yet, when was the last time you heard a sermon, podcast or read a book solely about friendship? Now it’s time, to paint and write about what makes friendship beautiful and healing and rich between women and men, between wife and husband, between colleagues of the same or opposite sex, between parents and grandparents, between God and me.
