Art is therapy. For me & for others.
Sometimes, when I step back, I am struck by the power of the lens of viewing. So first – stop and look. Immerse yourself in the painting.
It is fall 2023. It has been a hard three years for everyone. Covid, war, isolation, withdrawal, vulnerability, not knowing the future, I suppose everybody experienced it differently, but for most people it has been quite challenging. And a lot of life altering changes have been made in our private lives. Mine included.
This is a fall painting, it’s called “The next step“. The next step into the unknown, into change. It’s mystical, yet inviting. Right now, life is a little more uncertain than usual and I believe this painting is the result of that. I find, this painting feels like a pillar of light, guarding the unknown, protecting. It feels like discovering newness, like taking the risks and finding the beauty that awaits as a reward. This work functions as an architype of the unknown future, and of a new beginning. For my life, that was what last year was and what this year still is. Having moved from the security of employment into developing an arts practise. Having moved from a stable and comfortable way of living into living in a van, not knowing what tomorrow will bring. Not yet knowing what the pillars which will support me will be. Questions of paying for food or gas, as a real metaphor of fuel for life. Now see the little fairy cocoon . A life in transformation and challenge. Yet this old life, feeds the new. Renewal, a rebirth of life itself.
Painting outside most of the time can be a real struggle. The weather is sometimes unpredictable and not always in my favour. There are weeks I can’t paint much, because it’s too windy, or rainy. For me, the artist, it was forty hours of immersion, risk and benefit to paint this. Forty hours of wonder, beauty and amazement. Hours and hours of feeding my soul.
When was the last time your life was “unpredictable“?
When was the last time you stepped into the unknown?
Can you put yourself in this picture as I have done?
I did this as I was painting it. I was painting more than what was simply before me – the work was also my therapy. I have come to realise that I have dedicated a lot of my life, particularly my professional life to bring beauty, peace and light into sometimes dark and hopeless situations. I have worked with “the misfits“, the less fortunate, the depressed and those who found life was torture. For those who don’t know I was a social worker before I started painting.
By now it is very clear to me that I paint what’s on the other side of the tunnel. I display vulnerability and transformation as much as I paint “iconic” nature, that fuels life. This is one of the very first paintings I am proud of and that screams “this is me“. My life and artistic work - finally - is a whole, and wholesome in its consistency.
Immersion is more than being there, it is being there. Bringing the baggage, the thoughts , even the songs, the life lived to the canvas. This is the artist.