Art therapy

Your life and health may depend on it, especially now

This isn’t the post I wanted to write this week and it has taken all week to gather the words together because I just can’t quite land anywhere with it all. I had wanted to tell you that my one-of-a-kind thangka canvas giclee prints, which I am calling “Threads of Divinity” are live in my Etsy shop. I will dive in deeper about these next post because I feel compelled to talk about something else this week.

For the record, I’m just sitting in a liminal space feeling like the other shoe hasn’t dropped about the election. I haven’t a clue what that shoe is about, but it just feels like the path between now and when the president gets sworn in on January 6th, is not going to be a clear and straight path. Something weird is going to happen. I find myself grieving but also without a sense of finality about the whole thing. There seems to be something we haven’t seen yet in this great cosmic play.

Above is a detail of a commissioned painting I did during the pandemic. It is Kali, Gaia, and White Tara, the Mothers of Fury, Grief, and Compassion in this depiction. And it feels very appropriate for what many of us are going through now.

I have been listening to a book recommended to me by the incredible artist Carrie Anne Baade called, Your Brain on Art, by Susan Magsamen and Ivy Ross. Because my husband, Michael, is a meditation teacher, I have read many neuroscience-based books on the benefits of meditation and mindfulness. He’s even written one of his own called The Mindful Geek. So I am very familiar with the neural impact of mindfulness-based activities on health and wellness in all aspects of our lives. And what could be more mindful than making a piece of art, music, dancing, and creative writing?

Your Brain on Art is a great read, and I am keeping my sketchbook next to me as I listen to write down such gems as “The world is full of magic things patiently waiting for our senses to grow sharper.” Over and over again, the authors wax poetic about how creating art during difficult times gives us tools to process what we are going through and the practice literally rewires our brains to allow us to think of new ways of being in the world and alternate ways of seeing ourselves.

For a reason I won’t get into right now, I am about to start weaning my son. He’s had Booby Milk, as he calls it, for the whole 2 plus years of his life. I kept hoping he would naturally just stop over time and I’m sure he would if I could wait long enough. But unfortunately, I can’t.

So I’ve created a whole ritual around it, starting with a boob cake party and a weekly offering to the Great Mother of Milk to say thanks for all of the milk he’s had in his life. I’m also writing and illustrating him a book about it that we can read together that tells a story of this ritual as well as instills all of the power of Booby Milk in him. I will share this whole process once I’ve actually begun it, mainly so you all can see the cake lol! But what struck me is that I was doing exactly what the book was advocating that I do.

My artwork is cathartic in a lot of ways already. I generally paint things that I am personally going through, thinking about, grappling with, or interested in, and my paintings are deeply autobiographical even if they don’t look like that at first blush. But this kind of work is a little deeper and more specific than even my usual way of working with things in my life.

There is something tactile and immediate about working with watercolor for me. With the mische technique, I am going over and over the same image many times so there is something repetitively healing about that kind of attention to the same material. But with watercolor and working in a book format, I am able to get a completed painting finished in a day, which allows me to think about this topic from a variety of angles at a much faster pace. It’s allowed me to work through why I’m having so many huge feelings about letting this part of my relationship with my babe go, where the stuck parts are in my body, what my true fears are, and so much more.

I want to give this short example of my own process of creating this work to encourage all of you to try something for yourself. Art isn’t a one-size-fits-all of course and what works for me, may not be what does it for you. But here’s a few general tips I can offer:

• Choose a medium that isn’t your usual way of expression.

  • For example, I am using watercolor in a painterly manner, which I never do for my own practice. It is completely liberating and I’m loving it.

• Choose a surface or format you usually don’t work with.

  • I am creating a book, so it has a story, themes within the illustrations, etc. This is allowing me to not only say everything I want to say but get important messages out to my son that I can’t convey in words through my images.

  • The point of switching things up from your normal art practice is that this allows you some freedom to explore and just let it be. If I sit down with a canvas and oil paints, I have a very specific way I approach those things and it is uncomfortable and awful to deviate from it. My work then becomes about that uncomfortability, rather than processing or working with whatever I want to work on. So I’ve found that breaking that mold and using completely different materials than I normally would, allows me to just let the process flow organically.

• This is not about showing anyone, this is about creating it for YOUR SELF.

  • Do this practice FOR YOU. Not social media, not as a side hustle, not as anything other than for the sake of doing it. This is key. If you feel like you are augmenting what you are making because someone is going to think this way or that way about it, stop. Go back and do it again. Get to the core of what it feels like to authentically create for yourself.

  • Dance like no one is watching. Art like you are the only one who will see it. For this practice, it must have the incubation period it deserves. If later you deem it worthy or important to share with the world then do so, but you can’t create from this place in the beginning. All artists need some kind of secret practice. It’s the prima materia that everything comes from and without it, there is no compost with which to fertilize the rest of what you do.

The future is uncertain. How everything will play out is yet to be determined but one thing is sure. ALL of us are going to need to be resourced to deal with it. Art is one way, apparently, now a neuroscientifically proven way (because well, it’s gotta be proven by science for it to be real in our society <slight eye roll>), to cope with shit. And shit is what we are going to have to be dealing with for a while. I don’t have any big philosophical words for coping or solace. I’m still trying to figure it all out myself. But I can give you the nudge to KEEP MAKING ART or START MAKING ART if you aren’t doing it already. Don’t doom scroll, make something. You are welcome.

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I am in a show this coming weekend at ARC Gallery in San Francisco called JOY. I am so excited for this show and it looks like it’s going to be an incredible collections of artists.

I will be doing an artist talk virtually on December 5th, from 6-7pm. If you would like to hop on and listen to me and a handful of the other artists in the show speak about their work, you can register for free here: https://us06web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZMtdu6srjstGdIPCZtYETFqpD-rWvNe2THH

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The next show at the Berkeley Alembic that I am curating is going to open November 23rd. It is going to be amazing. Mark your calendars if you are local. I’ll dive in deeper next time.

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I love you all. Thank you for being here.