Inspiration Fridays! Art Anxiety
Art Anxiety
I started off this morning in a foul mood. This may have been due in part to the fact that it was 2:30 AM, but waking in a panic is never particularly fun.
“Today I escaped anxiety. Or no, I discarded it, because it was within me, in my own perceptions — not outside” – Marcus Aurelius
I keep a lot of plates spinning in the air. To-do lists and calendars help, but I still can end up wrestling a busy mind at the end of the day. Anxious overload can get the best of me if I don’t keep it in check.
This is where my love of painting probably was born. Painting for me, is a meditation. Everything falls away. I’m left only with the decisions in front of me… Should this shape be larger or smaller? Would it help if that part were lighter? What if I neutralized some of that red and let just a little bit of the pure saturated color coming through?
There is another, deeper level of dialogue, moving through the paintings as well. Sure, painting can be difficult, even painful sometimes. It’s not easy. But it’s also not dangerous, and if our paintings go awry, no one’s going to get hurt. Our art affords us a safe place to land. To experiment with ideas like risk, failure, and discovery. Our art urges us forward. Peeling back the vail to check in with unexplored parts of ourselves that we may not have had access to. We are creating a vibrant space to practice being our best and worst selves. A place to discover who we are, and that we are safe.
Me showing where I go to practice life.
Afraid? Nervous? Anxious? Painting may not solve it for you, but the reality of our everyday will show up in our paintings. It teaches is to see ourselves more clearly. All of ourselves. Our art provides an incredible training ground for life. It loads us up with failure after failure and fuels us with success after success. Overtime, this practice of painting can teach us to be brave. Every painting has an ugly stage. After a while, you begin to recognize them for what they are and they aren’t so devastating. Eventually, you learn that those are the moments to keep moving forward. To keep painting.
In life as an art, it’s easy to fool ourselves into thinking we aren’t good enough or that we don’t have what it takes to get through some of these ugly stages. But we do have what it takes. We just need to keep painting.