Practice what you preach

While I am in school to be an art therapist, right now the schooling is just art school. Art school has many positives, but also can stunt creative thinking. ‘The rules’ applied to the elements and principles of design make you double back on choices you made on impulse or based on emotion. Art school causes you to think much more critically about your composition, and for me I have found that my intent behind the painting can get lost in all these anxieties.

How I want to help others in the future is by teaching them the raw more intuitive parts of their creative self, and how to use that to release and process past experiences. Making art can often be a process of discovery. I will start with an idea, but as I go, more things start to fall into place. I find this especially true with collage, which is a great way for those who feel nervous drawing or painting.

So, during times when I have been feeling rough, I turn to the sketchbook and just scribble in the colors that I felt that day. Even though art therapy was my original outlet into art, it doesn’t have to turn into an art career as I have made. It is just to understand yourself. And we can all understand ourselves more.

The present moment is the perfect teacher

I listened to a very interesting Radiolab episode yesterday about something called aphantasia, which is when your brain doesn’t see or use mental images as a part of your thinking or imagination process. So when they are asked to close their eyes and picture a red apple, they just can’t do it. As an artist, the ‘minds eye’ is so important for so many reasons. There are people who have heightened versions of being able to picture things in their mind, and I’m sure this comes quite in handy when it comes to making art. I can’t just draw realistically from images I make in my head. That has always been hard for me. Some artists just don’t need as many references as others, and some artists absolutely need something to work from. But apparently you can get better at this. I decided to start paying attention things that my minds eye produced when I was going through emotional events or having anxiety.

Along with paying attention to my minds eye, I have been re-reading a book that made a huge impact on me when I was younger, When things fall apart, by Peña chord on. She is a Buddhist monk and she is wiser than anyone I think I have ever known. In the first few chapters she talks about how during times when it feels like the rug has been pulled out from under us, and we don’t know where to land, is when we either open up, or shut down. We often concretize on people, emotions, and what the future may bring, and this is the root of our suffering. As a human, believing that anything lasts, sets you up to be broken hearten. And much of the time, when we think something that happened is ‘good’ or ‘bad’, but we have no idea the impact it may have on the future our our lives. Leaving room to not know exactly how you will react to the future, is very important. Oftentimes, when we are feeling negative emotions, they are exactly what we need to be feeling in order to see the truth. Here is a short passage:

“We don’t know anything. We call something bad; we call it good. But really we just don’t know.

When things fall apart and we’re on the verge of we know not what, the test for each of us is to stay on that brink and not concretize. The spiritual journey is not about heaven and finally getting to a place that’s really swell. In fact, that way of looking at things is what keeps us miserable. Thinking that we can find some lasting pleasure and avoid pain is what in Buddhism is called samsara, a hopeless cycle that goes round and round endlessly and causes us to suffer greatly. The very first noble truth of the Buddha points out that suffering is inevitable for human beings as long as we believe that things last—that they don’t disintegrate, that they can be counted on to satisfy our hunger for security”

Excerpt From

When Things Fall Apart

Pema Chödrön

I found these topics to be so congruent with my focus currently on art therapy. Sometimes art is thought of as working to create a final product, when the real art is in the journey creating it. Instead of working on something that will be great later, art therapy is about working with the now. It doesn’t matter what it looks like later, because the now is all we ever really have anyway.

So today’s drawings are about staying in the present moment and following my instincts. I will also be paying attention to how the images presently in my mind influence my art and vise versa.

First Post-11/20/2024

Hey all. I’m making this blog to document my use of art as therapy, because that’s what it has always been for me. This was a painting that I did the day after the election. I started with a large amount of titanium white, because I needed a way to describe the numbness and denial I was feeling at the time. There are a lot of gradient spaces because as I look into the future I see terrible things, blurry in view. All the colors I put down were diluted by the white, and i made use of large brushstrokes swirling all sorts of ways which were even a surprise to myself, I could not control the outcome. Just like I can’t control the future of our country.