Read my Latest Watercolour Blog Titled “Sunshine, Splashes and Wholeness”
The smile says it all…
Every once in a while a painting tells me I’ve reached an important place. That’s what this latest abstract did. To say that I loved working on it would be putting it mildly. It was a blast! Because it is so big (3 x 4 feet) I had to work on the floor. And working on the floor meant that much more of my body movement went into making this painting. So much more than just my hands had to be involved. And the experience was truly sensational. The physicality of it was an entirely new experience.
It reminds me of something talked about this week with my coach. I started with a coach a few weeks ago, to help with painting development as well as business. Some discussion about childhood and how children from abusive backgrounds (like me) have a tendency to live only in their brains. They shut themselves off from emotion and their bodies in order to separate themselves from what is happening to them. Unfortunately this coping mechanism often is taken into adult life. Which I can say I did for many years.
Emotion is not something I feel out of touch with anymore, and painting has brought me a long way. If anything it is the one thing that I am conveying in my work. My art motto, to bring people peace, freedom and joy, one watercolour painting at a time, means in essence that I want to share those positive emotions with others through my work. And I have no doubt that it is already doing this. Just from your responses and your willingness to reach out tells me I am on the right track and expressing myself as I wish.
The last and hardest part to integrate with the whole unbroken me though, was my body. I think that may well be the hardest for all of us, women in particular. Embracing a body that did not feel things it wanted to feel as a child, and then not being fully accepted by a society that wanted it to look different, makes for far too much self-loathing, internal criticism, and rejection. And all of that just coming from my own internal dialogue.
For me, I’ve found that G-d finds very gentle ways to reclaim those parts of me that were never meant to be lost. It is a process of recovering the whole person who has always been there. A decision to no longer hide any parts of me. So He points me in the direction of abstract paintings. Something I’d never really done much of before and had to start small. And something that provided answers only He knew at the time.
These abstractions got larger very quickly, just because of the joy and adventure of them. And it is because I could feel that adventure so much in the physicality of the process. Painting has become a joyful, fun experience not just for my mind and emotions but for my body too. And the best part of all is the realization that none of these parts are separate from one another in the first place. Feeling is everywhere. In the heart, mind, and body all at once. Healing comes to all of me. To all my parts. And in turn He lets me know I am whole and complete. Always have been.
All this revelation because of a painting or two….
