Art Therapy

What I dream of is an art of balance, of purity and serenity…something like a good armchair that provides relaxation from physical fatigue. —Henri Matisse

In the middle of January, I got a little 4×6 sketchbook and excavated my box of watercolor pencils from underneath a pile of paperwork. “Oh, there’s my marriage certificate,” I said out loud to no one. A reminder of just one of the struggles of the last year right there with the art supplies. Hello.

January is difficult in the Pacific Northwest, the days are short, the light is limited. It is a good time to leave town if you can, but we were still grappling with Omicron, travel remained uncertain. I had done an okay job of going to the gym and taking my Vitamin D (note to self, you need to get more Vitamin D, run to TJ’s next week, okay?), but I could feel the black dog tugging the hem of my pajamas. I was so tired.

I find meditation an unpleasant task, not quite like going to the dentist. More like cleaning the bathroom. I am bad at it, my brain is noisy, that one spot in my shoulder is always tight and it is where my focus goes. Seasoned meditators will say “You can work through that stuff, just recognize it and move on,” to which I say, “No. I don’t want to. I’m uncomfortable and nothing about this is helping me. YOU can work through it so you should go right ahead. I’m going to walk the dog.” I see the value of meditation, absolutely, and as a person with a hive of bees for a brain, it is a practice from which I would benefit were I able to connect with it. I can not.

The definition of meditation as sitting in silence with your own thoughts is quite narrow. I require an active meditation, a focal point for the anxious part of my brain. While the bees do their work, the rest of my brain can take a hot minute to unwind. To look away from the news, the lingering pain of my divorce, the darkness of winter, the weight of aging, all those things.

Early in the pandemic, I started swimming; it is a perfect meditation for me because I am singularly focused on breathing and repeated motion. If my mind wanders I run out of air or sink. But I overdid the crawl stroke. I had worked up to 1000 yards from a thrashing, sloppy, barely 200 yards. On the way I gave myself a repetitive stress injury and that defeats the purpose. I was benched. I started doing cardio while watching TV which is distracting, but hardly meditative, and my brain was getting angrier and angrier.

That’s why I went digging for the colored pencils. To find another place to park the hive.

I started with a timer. For 30 minutes I would draw the clutter on my kitchen table. A wilted flower, a key fob, a dashboard hula boy. The drawings were not good. The perspective was off, they were flat and awkward. I posted photos to Instagram. I am a public process kind of person; putting my drawings on the refrigerator door of the Internet is my way of tracking progress. My art school advisor sent me a class handout. “Who was your drawing teacher, it wasn’t me, was it?”  It felt like I’d forgotten everything but color. But my brain, those angry bees, they would settle and hum peacefully while I sat with my sketchbook. I wanted the work to be better, but mostly, I wanted the noise to stop.

About the same time, a friend had to back out of a watercolor class; I took her place. I have never had an affinity for watercolor. It does not stay put, you can not change your mind, I thought. I learned that this is not entirely true. My work got noticeably better over the weekend and I was delighted by some of it, plus, my brain felt squishy and content the whole time. I stopped struggling to sit for 30 minutes with my colored pencils and now I have filled about half my sketchbook with paintings and drawings. Some of them are still awkward and flat, but others are quite nice and it pleases me to look back at them. My perspective is better, still a little wonky because the lines are drawn by hand, but absolutely better. The objects have weight now, they sit on whatever surface I have decided to provide on the paper. Hopefully, my former teachers and classmates are less embarrassed by what they see now.

Sometimes I think, “Yeah, that’s nice.” Sometimes I think, “Meh, that’s not great, I’ll try again tomorrow.” Either way is fine.

Matisse wanted an art that was comfortable, relaxing. Art shouldn’t only be that. Art is not just a distraction or a meditation; it can be a reflection of or commentary on society, the political, on history. The art I made while I was a devoted working artist in the 90s is pleasing to look at but I know what it’s about. It’s a memoir of difficult times which is kind of my thing, I guess? Right now, I am more in Matisse’s camp, using the tools to find serenity. Meditation is meant to provide serenity through practice; that’s what making these little drawings and paintings is doing for me.

A lot of things can be meditation. Swimming laps, walking the dog, cooking. It’s single-tasking that does it. It is hard to observe and recreate the world on paper if the TV is on, it is hard to walk the dog if I am on the phone (your dog might require less attention than mine), it is hard to swim laps if I am inventorying my anger. Instead of sitting with my thoughts in classic meditation, I am trying to do one thing for at least half an hour every day. I don’t have to do it well, but it must be one thing and one thing only.

My one thing right now is art. It’s going okay.