I am about to embark on my final year of my art psychotherapy masters. During this training, I have built 'Lilly Mai Designs'. I create personalised, abstract art works that harmonise to clients interior and their preference to style and colour. Though I may work to a brief, I want to share in this blog how my understanding of art as a therapeutic tool can help support my art making processes.
One of the sacred lessons I have learnt during my training, is to sit with the acceptance that the act of art making requires enduring the unknown and sitting in discomfort of not knowing the final outcome. The making of my abstract paintings mirrors the process of working with clients; I accept that each stage is a process and that with time and trust in the therapeutic space/art studio space, the relationship between myself and the client will eventually build/ the painting will eventually come to being.
We cannot get to a final outcome straight away. The beauty of painting is that it identifies with the development of the self. I have moments whilst making where I feel I have just made a mess and failed that day, eventually the mess I have made will be nurtured into something that sits more comfortably with me and I can begin to imagine a composition or outcome.
Breathe, observe and breathe again. That is what I say to myself when I have had a moment of making. Where I have left my conscious thoughts of considering why I am making something and have entered my intuition and trust in the process. I sometimes (many times!) have looked at what I have made and wonder where it has come from. I reflect on the way I have immersed myself with the materials and the canvas and also how I feel before and after this act of creating. These meditative moments give me time to think about how I'm feeling in that moment and what emotion and thought has revealed and camouflaged itself into the marks made.
This blog will delve into how the art materials and techniques have supported the honing in on my experience as an art therapy trainee and how the work with my clients, which is currently in a children's bereavement service. All influence the composition and the choice of style technique.
So stay tuned and perhaps this blog can help you access and identify with you're willingness and desire to create. Trust that anything you make, is a representation and communication to an aspect of self. These creative extensions of our own being, authorise us to accept that we don't have to know the reasons why we have made something straight away, but with time we may come to understand it. Themes of colour, patterns and texture may illustrate our own patterns of behaviours, emotions and cycles that we currently and unconsciously exist in.
Speak to you soon!