What Will Transpire?

Being without a daily routine, without anything to focus on, with no goals in front of me has been both liberating and confusing. I am the kind of personality that doesn’t do nothing well. But I also resent and resist being told what to do or being beholden to the dictates and judgments outside myself.

And yet, that’s exactly what has given my life context and meaning and shape for decades. Knowing (or thinking I knew) what those who paid me expected and how to perform in line with, or hopefully above and beyond, those expectations was my way of being in the world.

My art, as it happens, also followed that pattern for a long while, driven by external motivations. What will people like? What will resonate with them and help connect me to them. So I did a lot of conceptual, cognitive-based, art. It was art designed specifically to communicate a specific thing. I loved doing it (still do) and it really spoke to people and was meaningful.

So when I joined a free 25-day challenge that I saw online one day, I figured I would just be doing more of the same but better. But, to his credit, months before this challenge, my therapist encouraged me to make art from “the bottom up” instead of from my head, and I had been playing with that. Lo and behold, that was exactly what the challenge was. Feeling first and creating from that place. Playing with making what came up from within. We were asked to spend just 20 minutes a day creating from a place of feeling and, eventually, authenticity of voice.

I made a lot of very confused and (to me) ugly art in the early days of the challenge, it was fun to make things, but I wasn’t feeling it really. As I was showing my therapist my art from the challenge and talking about how we were being encouraged to play, when I said that sometimes I didn’t feel playful.

“Does play always have to be a positive experience?” he asked. And then he talked about how he used to spend hours “playing” guitar in order to process some very deep and painful emotions. We talked a lot about the interpretation of the word play that makes joy seem to be a requirement….as if you can flip a switch into freedom and lightness.

Play approached as “mandatory fun” isn’t true play. To me, now, the idea of play centers on removing the constraints of judgment and binary thinking and especially the attachment to outcomes. There is no good or bad play. The exploration and experiencing of sensations and ideas and feelings and accessing imagination without boundaries or fear are essential parts of play…and they don’t all have to be steeped in positivity.

Shortly after that conversation, those of us in the challenge were told to look back at what we had made and think about what had felt good to make, as well as what parts of what we made felt the most like us. The two pieces that stood out to me were NOTHING like anything I had ever made ever. They were layered and a little chaotic, but in the end they felt and looked like me, my truth in the moment.

These are those two pieces. The second one really took me in a direction I didn’t see coming but that I loved.

I haven’t stopped since. Every day I spend at least a few minutes, and often several hours, lost in the process of putting down, peeling back, covering up and uncovering layers of media – acrylic, watercolor, oil pastels, colored pencil, ink. I listen to myself and I “hear” what the piece needs next and do that until it tells me it’s done.

Making “intuitive art” has given me a new place to focus (both inside myself and outside on the paper or canvas) and has given my days new purpose without expectation.

Click here to see the pieces I have made so far, what I am calling my Inner Landscapes.