Freeing The Artist within You

THE DESIRE TO PAINT haunted me for many years, but I fought the feeling. You're too old, to untalented, and you'll be too broke if you pursue this frivolous path, my rational mind scolded. But the heart is mighty, and eventually I grew afraid not to act upon my dream.

I began painting five years ago, at age 35, for the first time since grade school. I had just resigned from an intensely demanding job as manager of a theater company. My responsibilities involved supervising all the administrative affairs of the theater and catering to the daily needs of 50 musicians and actors. In retrospect, I realize that empowering others to create was a safe way to get involved in the arts, one that bypassed personal risk. Finally, the tensions of the job breached a breaking point, and I left. I decided to do temp work for a while so that I could figure out what my next step would be.

Even though I could support myself - and have time - by being a temp, becoming an artist seemed a remote possibility. In addition to worrying about my skills, talent, and how I would adjust to living on a much lower salary, I burdened myself withy idea of becoming a Great Artist. this impossible goal reflected a long-held tendency to be critical of myself and fearful of not measuring up to other people's standards. But after going over and over my worries and anxieties, illumination struck. Despite all the perceived obstacles I had placed in my path, one thing never changed: I wanted to paint. The dawning of this idea was incredibly freeing. I would simply paint. Hadn't I painted as a child? Children paint with wonder and spontaneity, without expectations or inhibitions. They paint forte job of it, and I realized that this natural way of painting might still be accessible to me.

Getting Started

As though in answer to my wishes, I noticed that the Open Center in New York city - a center for adult education with an emphasis on personal and spiritual growth - offered weekend-long workshops called "Painting from the Source." The workshop leader, artist and psychotherapist Aviva Gold has designed her classes for people with little or no formal art training and for painters who want to increase their creativity and freedom of expression. She finds that when participants are unencumbered by preconceived notions of what art is, "they create works that often end up singing with the vitality, authenticity, drama, and aesthetic and individual style that also characterize great art." Like many other artists, Aviva views painting as a door to the unconscious. It enables us, she says, "to tap the very center of our beings, the source of all creativity, and allow our most personal and archetypal [essential] images to emerge on paper."

The workshop was just the catalyst I needed. At the beginning, Aviva instructed us to be ourselves on paper - with no apologies, no explanations, no judgments, no comparisons. I felt as happy as a child on the last day of school. I soon began covering a canvas with the bold, delicious colors I love (and have continued to favor in my work) - purple, magenta, yellow,blue, turquoise. During the workshop, and afterward at home, I found I especially loved painting people - people representing different facets of my personality, people I had grown up with and loved and feared, people with long necks, wild hair, and big behinds. From my paintbrush flew spirit guides in cloaks patterned with mysterious symbols or naked with flowers growing out of their wombs. There was no need to struggle over form. No need to make sense. I was free to paint a tree in the middle of a living room if that's what occurred to me (and it did!).

The Healing Power of Art

In the three years since I took the workshop, making art has become an essential part of my life. My paintings - which I describe as imaginative dream sequences with deep emotional overtones - bring my unconscious to light. I paint to please myself and to express my deepest feelings - including those painful emotions, experiences, and memories that I used to repress. And I've found that, as in therapy, bringing these repressed feelings out into the open can bring about true healing.

For example, for years I'd suffered from a backache that none of the remedies I'd tried cured. I wanted to discover the cause, so I concentrated on the backache and started painting. (I later titled the finished work Heart Ache.)

The first form to appear on the paper was a tall gray figure with a fiery heart on her back - me in pain. When I was almost finished painting the canvas, the image of a little girl happily holding a painted heart came to me.

I paint an image the best way I can, without concern for proportion or logic. One painting I made (Shelter, above) reveals a woman enfolded within a tree while another woman prays to the tree.

When I completed her, I found that her image was strongly familiar and satisfying - she was me as a little girl. Still, an untouched space remained in the middle of the canvas. While deciding how to fill it in, I envisioned an entire scene. The little girl's delight had turned to sorrow after her mother, distraught over a fight with her husband, threw the card in the trash. The daughter was in tears because she felt that her very self had been discarded. Though not literally true, this story represented my feelings of being unappreciated when I was younger.

I realized then that the fiery heart in my painting symbolized sorrow - caused by the still-present urge to repress my artistic impulses out of fear that my work will be rejected. Although Heart Ache was a difficult painting to make, it brought me a precious release: once my suppressed feelings were brought to consciousness, my backache disappeared forever.

How I Work

I approach a painting in two basic ways. Sometimes I know exactly what I want to paint. On other occasions I have no particular idea in mind, so I stand in front of the blank paper until an image comes to me. Then, allowing the brush to lead me, I paint the image the best way I can, without concern for proportion, anatomy, or logic (the sky might be raining keys). One painting I made - called Shelter (shown at left) - reveals a woman enfolded within a tree while another woman prays to the tree, a common practice in certain African religions, I later learned. One of my favorite works is of a woman seated upon a block of lush, grassy ground that has pulled off from the earth is flying her to the sun! I sometimes get impulses to paint corny, sentimental symbols - such as hearts, flowers, and suns -that make me feel good.

Sometimes a theme in a painting I'm working on makes me uncomfortable, and I get a case of the proverbial artist's block.Some forms that my blocks take are sudden fatigue, ravenous hunger (even though I've recently eaten), or a pressing desire to make an unimportant telephone call. However, I resist the temptation to stop painting. I have discovered that if I paint through that feeling of discomfort, the fatigue vanishes, the hunger dissipates, the telephone call loses its urgency...and, finally, there's a breakthrough! Images and symbols rich with meaning emerge.

Although I paint primarily for my own pleasure, I was invited to participate in two art exhibits last year - and, to my surprise, many of my painting were purchased. I also received a grant from a nonprofit organization, Art Matters, which gave me important verification that I was on the right path as well as a needed supplement to my temp-work income.

I no longer struggle with the question of whether I am an artist. I feel as if I'm a child again, painting for the joy of it, painting because I dare to. There is no right or wrong in the artistic process, only me, open to whatever happens on canvas. Witnessing my own creative courage makes me feel proud. It has helped me grow as a person and given me the confidence to make changes in other areas of my life. I know that if I can confront myself through the artistic process, I can face and transcend any other challenges I meet. Painting is the greatest gift I have ever given myself.

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