![]() I was in shock, yet typically, when in shock I knew I tended to act unusually calm and reasonable. I had to double check twice to make sure I wasn’t hallucinating. She wasn’t an archetype, but a real person. She was going through my cupboard filled with old wedding pictures. One random Saturday morning, I awoke to find a young woman, around 25 years old, coming off of some meth or heroin high in my back studio that I usually kept unlocked because the perimeter of my house was well gated. In fact, I felt the opposite my home post-divorce had become my respite when everything else in my life seemed turned upside down. I never felt unsafe or in danger in my home or neighborhood. I was living alone, a year after divorce in the house I lived in with my ex-husband in Venice Beach, CA. I was feeling somewhat like the crazy woman myself. In my own life, things felt uncertain, chaotic, ungrounded. I had met her in my creativity.īut secretly, I was coming to understand her beyond that. The Mad Woman who likes to step in sometimes to shake our world, wake our reality. I finished the painting with glee.Ī dear friend, who is a Jungian therapist, told me recently about the “Crazy Woman” archetype. Without interpretation or need to understand what I was doing, I energetically painted cracks all through my body. I took out a small brush and started drawing black cracks, as many cracks as I could, cracking the body into thousands of pieces. “She would crack me into a hundred pieces…” “If with respect for what you’ve already painted you allowed her to go crazy on the paper without covering what you already painted or ripping it up, what would she paint?” “She would explode everything up!” I answered. “What if the crazy woman painted for you? What would she do?” “What if a crazy woman came into the room?” she asked me. But my “wall” was concrete, or industrial metal, or super-duper spy-movie-like with some computer-code contraption locking all security systems down. My painting teacher came over to explore some questions that could help unblock me. Once, when I was in a painting workshop, I hit a wall of resistance, totally stumped by what to paint next. It’s my covid canvas, my time to tune into something that gives me hope and brings joy.“Every really new idea looks crazy at first.” ~Abraham H. When the stress of Covid creeps in, I have a canvas I go to and I just start working on it. The more I paint the more I want to paint and I have been using affirmations to redirect the inner critic. ![]() ![]() Giving myself permission to paint and make art without perfectionism is something I’m still working on. ![]() This healing art journey has been an important part of my recovery. Years ago when I was having a difficult time and not painting I heard my inner voice say “If I can paint, I can heal”. My life lesson has been to paint for painting’s sake. The inner critic can keep me from making art or thinking my art isn’t good enough. One thing I have always struggled with when making art is the inner critic, this doesn’t just exist in my head with my art but can spill over into other areas of my life. I am following a workbook called The Artist’s Way, it gives tools that artists can use to unblock their creativity and heal some of the barriers that exist in the process of making art. One thing I continue to do is explore my creativity through a recovery lens. Since being in quarantine I have been finding stress relief in making art, whether I am painting, collaging or coloring in my coloring book.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |