Summer Garden: June in Full Bloom

Twenty-five years ago, I sat alone by a lake in mid-Finland on a midsummer night. I've been chasing that feeling ever since — and learning that it doesn't come to you. You have to put yourself in its way.

Jue Feng

5/22/20263 min read

Summer Garden: June in Full Bloom

Twenty-five years ago, I sat alone by a lake in mid-Finland on a midsummer night.

I wasn't doing anything. I wasn't trying to feel anything in particular. I was simply sitting by the water, listening to the small sound it makes when it moves — that quiet weaving — and my own heartbeat underneath it.

I don't know how long I sat there. I was twenty-something, newly arrived in Finland, carrying the particular weight of a life mid-transformation. And in that stillness by the water, something rare happened. The green silence seemed to absorb everything. And in its place: the simple sense that this moment was worth being alive for.

I have chased that feeling ever since. Not desperately — but deliberately. Because I've learned that it doesn't come to you. You have to put yourself in its way.

What Finnish June does to you

June in Finland arrives like a quiet extravagance. The light stays almost the entire day — golden and unhurried, the kind of light that makes everything look slightly more significant than it did in winter. The gardens fill suddenly, all at once, as if they've been waiting. The whole landscape turns a shade of green that doesn't exist anywhere else in quite the same way.

Something shifts in the body, too. The pace changes. Not because the calendar demands it, but because the light gives you permission.

Most summers our family chooses to travel, visiting and filling the holidays with activities. And the midsummer feeling — that stillness by the water — has to be actively pursued. It doesn't happen by accident. It happens because you decide, on a specific day, to sit somewhere beautiful and let it find you.

That is what a Colorwell workshop is, at its heart. Not a class. A decision. A two-hour window you carve out of a June Sunday and give entirely to one thing.

What happens in the room

When the first painting begins, you can feel the uncertainty in the air. People glance at each other's work, then back at their own. The anxiety is almost visible — the worry of doing it wrong, of being compared, of not being enough.

By the third painting, something has quietly shifted.

People are looking at their own paper. Not checking what others are doing, not measuring themselves against the person beside them. Just painting. Following their own brush, trusting their own hand.

That shift — from self-consciousness to self-trust — is the real work of the session. The flowers are almost beside the point. What you leave with is not just three paintings. It's the memory of what it felt like to focus on one thing completely, and find that you were capable of more than you thought.

June: Summer Garden, In Full Bloom

This June, we paint summer flowers. The full light of a Finnish midsummer. Colours that don't apologise for themselves.

We work with wet-on-wet techniques, building in layers — loose, generous, unhurried. Three paintings in two hours, each one a little more confident than the last.

You bring whatever week you've been carrying. The paper receives it. The water responds. And for two hours, the only thing that matters is what's happening on the page in front of you.

That midsummer feeling — the one by the lake, the one worth being alive for — is available more often than we think. You just have to decide to show up for it.

📅 Sunday, 14 June · 13:30–15:30 📍 Oodi Library, Helsinki €15 materials fee · all other costs covered · all levels welcome · 12 people max

Registration for June Full Blooms workshop

This workshop is for participants aged 18 and over. I 15€ /per person material fee

These pilot sessions are our way of saying thank you to the people who've been part of Colorwell from the beginning. There's no session fee — just a small €15 materials contribution to cover your supplies. Everything else is on us.