Translating emotion onto the canvas

I have just spent a good amount of time writing to try to explain the piece I've painted the last few days.  I erased it. I realize I don't know what to say about it.  It's a self-portrait.  It depicts some emotions I've experienced recently.  It's been a painful time in many ways for several reasons I choose not to go into here.  This painting is an attempt to flood myself with compassion for the experience and to love myself deeply through it.  I use art as a way to come to terms with my feelings, to process emotions, to get out my sadness and grief and anger, to express my joy and fascination with the world, to delight in the beauty of the world.  It is the way I experience and process my life.

I would like to know what you experience when you see this picture if you feel like sharing.  I don't know how it appears to others...

How real is too real??

How real is too real?  That's a question I've been dealing with at some level for my whole life.

I was born sensitive and learned early on that others around me weren't comfortable with my sensitivity.  I learned to contain my sadness and worry and anxiety.  I learned to self-soothe as a three year old.  My dad's highest compliment to me was that I was two going on twenty-one, i.e. I was mature beyond my years.  I took that to mean that I could/should take care of myself and others and not be an immature child.  I took the message to heart and was always "good" and "well-behaved". 

But not anymore.  Don't get me wrong - I'm a "good person", but I no longer feel any compunction to "be good" so I don't upset others.  If I'm having feelings, I express them - appropriately, but I let them out. 

For example,  one day when Chris and I were fairly newly-married, I was having some feelings about who-knows-what - I was crying good and loud.  He tried to shush me.  As a knee-jerk reaction, based on my life's training up to that point, I pulled myself together and tried to stop crying, tried to "be good", didn't want to upset him.  Then my more conscious awakened self came to the fore and asked him why I should be quiet?  He said it was morning and time for the kids to start waking up, and he was afraid they would be upset if they heard me cry.  That did it!  I told him in no uncertain terms that the children had heard me cry before and would hear me cry again and could handle hearing me cry and I wasn't going to stop crying if I needed to cry. If he couldn't handle it, he could leave, but I needed to cry and I was going to cry.  I cried.  Good and loud and long.  Chris, fabulous caring man that he is, stayed with me as I cried.  I cried myself out and got on with my day. The kids did hear me cry and asked me at breakfast what was wrong.  I told them I had needed to cry and a bit about what it was about (I have no idea now what I was so upset about).  They nodded, smiled when I told them what I'd told Chris about them having heard me cry before, then went on eating their cereal. 

I want my kids to be able to be with emotions!  Theirs and others.  It's so healthy!

These days I seem to be working with this topic a lot.  I've been doing a lot of deep emotional work - I think that's the cause of these damn headaches I've been having.  It comes out in my writing.  I keep wanting it to come out in my painting, but I feel so verklemmt about that.  Ever since I started painting, I've been trying to pull together the two dichotomous sides of myself:  the rational, perfectionistic side and the emotional side which wants to yell and scream from the mountaintops (and whom I'm afraid is a bit nuts, if truth be told).  I want my pictures to be photorealistically perfect, AND I want to throw paint at the canvas with abandon.  Sometimes I do throw paint at the canvas and let my feelings out there.  The process is glorious, and I love it while I'm in it.  I have lots of insights and breakthroughs and am completely absorbed in what I'm doing.  The product, however, is nothing I am willing to show others.  Its power is in the process.  The product just isn't aesthetically pleasing or something I think others could understand/would like.

I know I'm afraid people won't like what I've done when I really let loose.  That's true for my writing when it's process writing too.  I'm taking a writing class from Valley Haggard right now.  The process we use is basically free writing for 10 minutes then we read what we've written out loud.  Last Thursday I let the words flow without pause.  I wrote about my headache and how I really felt in that moment.  It was the first time I'd actually allowed myself to feel and be in the pain.  I was afraid to let others hear how I really felt.

But magic happened.  As I read the piece, I could feel the other students become absolutely still.  They were riveted by my words.  I read slowly and let myself stay in the feelings they evoked.  I allowed myself to be present to my own experience and to honor it. 

When I finished I felt empowered.  Fear rushed in to gobble up some of that, but I tried to stay in the power of saying my truth.

I am choosing to walk through my days staying in the power of my truth, uncomfortable and prickly though it may be.  Perhaps it is also beautiful and compelling for others - and for me.  Perhaps my insides are not the ugliest thing on the planet.  Perhaps they deserve to live and breathe and have their breathing.  It's a revolutionary concept, but in my core, I believe it's true.  Now all(!) I have to do is trust that and allow myself my authenticity, fully and completely, trusting that I and others can handle who I really am.

Am I alone in this, or do you know this feeling also?  Do you fear sharing your full self?  How do you work with it?

Processing Dylan's surgery through paint

As most of you probably know if you read my blog somewhat regularly, my 18-year-old son just had extensive surgery to correct his scoliosis.  Thankfully the operation was a success, and he is in the long process of healing now - which means trying to function while doped up on Percocet and Valium and weak and wobbly in his legs and trying to learn to re-assess the world from 2 inches higher up!  (The surgery made him significantly taller, so now he's about 6'4".) Apparently it makes a big difference to ones center of gravity to be that much taller, so he's having to sort all that out too. 

This painting is one I did a few days after his surgery.  It's based on a photo taken the day after surgery when he woke up, groggy and swollen-faced and in pain, in the PCU, yet still wonderfully present.  

It is helpful to me in times of stress to express my world visually.  Painting Dylan did two things for me - I painted him with my hands, a much more expressive way of painting than when I use a brush, so I could feel the vitality of my feelings, my fear, my anxiety, my relief, my concern, my gratitude.  It all comes out through my hands.  I could get my mind into another mode - no longer squirreling around frantically in the aforementioned feelings, but rather thinking more analytically, using a different part of my brain, yet still focused on my darling son.  Towards the end of the process, I did use a brush at times, so I was more delicate in my touch, expressing my tenderness and gentleness and absolute love.

Some people process their lives through words.  I do that too when I journal or write this blog, but I think the more profound process for me is to paint and visually re-create something I've seen and am experiencing.

How do you process your world?