Heart Work

To her, the greenery looked charred and broken, as if a wildfire had come through.

“I just remember standing there, and my emotional landscape was so barren. That’s all I could see. It was just crazy. I knew I had to do something to pull my life out of this pit,” she said.

Inspired by an artist who painted 100 canvases, Loughmiller decided to paint 100 of her own, but hers would all be hearts, and each one would be in honor of a woman she was grateful for.

She’s built each canvas herself, out of wood. The painting surface is actually flooring underlayment.

As she progressed, she found that, without meaning to, she had begun a dedicated gratitude practice.

“With each painting, I could feel my internal landscape shift. Things started to grow again,” she said. She started feeling grateful for other things besides the women. “It spilled out of that.”

She still has tough times where she feels pulled into the pit of depression, but knows that gratitude is a ladder to climb back out. “I am so grateful I have tools that help me balance.”

Since college, she’s struggled with depression, fear and self-doubt. “This project taught me I can do something big and see it to the end, and we have incredible capacity within us and we really can change the world.”

Her experience has been “way too powerful to keep to myself,” she said. So she launched the Hundred Hearts Project. Found online at hundredheartsproject.org, she tells her story of overcoming depression through gratitude, and encourages others to join her by expressing gratitude to 100 people “in a way that feels right to you.”

As one easy option for expressing gratitude, she sells blank-inside cards featuring her heart paintings, offering them in starter packs of 10, or full packs of 100. She even includes a spreadsheet to keep track of who has received cards.

“Since then I have sent out thousands of cards,” she said. The income is paying for her project.

On her website, she wrote, “Gratitude, when practiced over and over and over establishes new thought patterns that naturally focus on the positive. A mind that is filled with gratitude has no room for negativity.”

Not only is gratitude transformational for the person expressing it, she said, but “You also get to touch the heart of the person you’re expressing gratitude for, so it’s a two-fer.”

She has ambitions of taking her message to an international audience. “I have big dreams for this project because I really, really believe in the power of gratitude.”

She’s working with Immense Imagery on a video to start a national campaign and has launched ads on social media and is also seeking out print articles, like this one.

She said she’d like to tell her story to any local groups who’d like to hear it. She can be reached at info@hundredheartsproject.org.

She and her husband Russell are the parents to four kids, ages 14 to 6. She also likes the idea of kids seeing their parents working on something with a higher purpose.

“I don’t want them to just see me washing dishes. If I want them to live a big bold life, then I need to live a big bold life.”

When she began her project, she purposely chose a goal of painting 100 hearts, because such a large goal “forces a habit so you have to keep going.”

Coming up with 100 people seemed daunting at first, but now she wishes she could do more. Some of the women she barely knows, “and some of them I don’t know at all,” such as authors.

“Everybody has had at least 100 people touch their lives in some way,” she said.

A few of her pieces are especially meaningful, one for a woman who has struggled with severe health problems, and another for a woman who has been through family tragedy.

Of the woman with health issues, Loughmiller said, “the change that gratitude has brought into my life, I so wanted to share with her.” That woman actually birthed the idea of her project.

“When I painted this one, I found myself: I’m an artist.”

The second especially meaningful heart represents a troubled relationship that has seen healing purely through her art. “I had to dig deep to find reasons I was grateful for her. We have a rough history, this woman and I. Lots of pain and heartache.”

As she worked on the painting, she felt it give her the gift of looking at their relationship through new eyes. “I only feel love and compassion for her now, and I spent 25 years struggling with this person.”

Only her mother, her two daughters and one other woman, who Loughmiller felt needed to know, are aware they have a heart painting.

The rest of them will be invited to the opening where they will learn which heart is theirs. After the hearts tour the country for two years, they will be given to each woman.

She doesn’t start a heart with a person in mind. At a certain point, “I start feeling stuck and that's when I know it needs to belong to someone. I hold the piece in my hand and wonder who it's for. A name will pop into my mind — and, magically, so will an idea for how to finish the piece. It's an incredible process to be a part of.”

While she is actually nearing the finish line of her project, which is a September art show at The Dalles Art Center – getting started was an ordeal.

She had “a full-on panic attack” at the idea of people seeing her work. “I couldn’t sleep, I felt nauseous, it was hard to breathe, I was sweating.”

But she essentially felt forced to act. “I couldn’t live with this kind of fear. It’s going to kill me. So I just decided to do it.”

She didn’t start with the idea of hearts. Her first painting actually is tucked away behind the door of her studio. It’s not displayed on shelves with the other ones.

She painted it for her late grandmother, who was a big believer in people and what people can do. “I felt, who could I paint for that would love it no matter what?”

“It’s not all that great,” she said of the floral painting, with the word courage woven into it. “I don’t need it to be behind the door, but it’s behind my door.”

It was a rectangle, and that just didn’t feel right to her. “I kept wishing it was square.”

She decided she would only paint hearts, only for women, on wood, and on squares. “It just gelled and we were off to the races.”

While she minored in art at the University of Idaho, she took every class except painting, it seems. She finally took one last month, but has found experience to be the best teacher.

“You figure out real fast what works and what doesn’t work,” she said.

Each painting takes three to 20 hours, with most taking eight to 10 hours. Because she’s a stay at home mom – and entrepreneur – with four kids, she paints in small chunks of time, maybe an hour a day.

She has a variety of methods – sewing, collage, painting, beading, shadow boxes, and 3D insets. She’s used stencils for a few, laying down layer after layer for a rich effect. “I really like tedious methods,” she said.

She’s worked with egg shells, and also found that deli paper takes her acrylic paint well, since it is thin and lays down nicely on the wood but is also crinkly so it adds texture.

She’s found that she’s drawn to mandalas, which have geometric patterns. She also likes bright colors, borders and boundaries.

She considers herself a minimalist – “I don’t like clutter.” But in her artwork, with complex pieces that have a lot going on in them, she’s found that “more is more.”

And her project is as organized as her house and art studio. She’s got a spreadsheet to keep track of it all.

Creating her art studio meant rearranging the whole family. “It’s a small house, so I claimed my space, a room of my own.”

The girls were without a bedroom for maybe a year, she said, as rearrangements were made. Daughter Anna, 12, said, “it felt like two years.”

“It’s been a sacrifice for everybody, but big benefits,” Loughmiller said as she scooped up daughter Rita, six, and nuzzled her. “They’ve got a mom that – I’m capable of loving them.”