The restorative power of making art in the bad times

Or: self-regulating with paper, scissors and glue stick

It’s been a tender time. Excavating myself to find a path inward, a path that eventually leads outward, has been as painful and convoluted as it sounds. Figuring out for myself what I want to do next, not to mention beginning the job hunt again (after a role I secured fell through on a technicality), has felt like dragging myself through the mud. Celebrating Florian’s second birthday - I mean, what?! - and Mother’s Day shortly thereafter, has also bitten me to the quick. Watching Florian grow tall, having conversations with him, cliché as it is, makes life feel like it’s in fast forward. Which has me feeling raw, and vulnerable. It’s been a significant time of transition. And it’s been A Lot.

Art has meant a lot to me in this time. Turning to art as a form of succour is, for me, a proven method of slowing down and making spaciousness in my life when it feels hectic and small. Painting has always been The One, always a source of focus and calm; but lately it’s felt too big, too messy, too uncertain a process. I have to struggle for so. long. with a shitty painting to make it into a good painting - and frankly, I have enough elements of my life up in the air with no sign of landing. I don’t need another one right now.

So thank god, during those homebound months of 2020, I started drawing again. Drawing is meditative, absorbing. When I paint, I stomp around, nibble on a bikkie, move back and forth relentlessly between the easel and the chair, looking, daubing, thinking, mixing colours. When I draw, I sit and I look at what’s directly in front of me. I move into its gravitational pull. Sometimes, hours later, I realise I’ve forgotten to eat. That never happens while painting. Painting requires endless snacks.

And lastly, there’s collage - a practice* I always treat like a distant relation, connected, but not really. Collage is often, if not always, in service of painting and drawing. A supportive practice. Secondary, even.

Yesterday, I had a gut-desire to turn my attention fully to collages - I felt intuitively that it would soothe me. Apart from the enraging vagaries of the self-serve copy machines at that fluorescent-lit hell pit we’ll call Pofficeworks, it did exactly as I’d hoped. Collaging felt restorative. It allowed me to clear my head. Doing it on paper, with glue (I normally just rearrange paper ad infinitum, taking photographs as I go), making permanent works was different enough to the work I normally make that I didn’t feel laden with my own rules and conventions. It was freeing. When I paint, I’m always haunted by the paintings I’ve made before, by the spectre of “how I usually do it”. It requires so much concentration and energy to shake off your habits when you begin to work - whether you make art or not, I’m sure you know what I mean.

My drawings are more inventive by their nature I suppose - as quasi-cartographical picture-making goes - but I’m still using the constraints of my materials and how I prefer to use them, how I prefer them to look. My subconscious biases are driving the bus.

I mean, when are they not?

Is this actually all it means to make visual art?

One of my subconscious biases is to not make anything too “beautiful”. For a lover of beauty and a general subscriber to the Beauty of Life, this is a strange one. To want to make pictures that are not too straightforwardly enjoyable is a longrunning perversity on my part. Maybe it’s a hangover from the early days of painting at artschool: as a female painter especially, your work wouldn’t be taken seriously if it was too “nice”. We all learned to roll our eyes at paintings of flowers. (I really really like paintings of flowers).

Or perhaps it’s just my rusted-on belief that beauty is bettered by waywardness, by a dash of weirdness. In the case of my paintings, though, it’s more like I dropped the salt shaker of weirdness in by accident. And lately, that hasn’t sat so well with me. I’m seeking a peace that I need to find - even in small doses - in my own work, my own paintings, and drawings. And collages. I’ve been leaning into the idea that next chapter of my life will be on a frequency of grace, and patience, more so than exertion, and busy-ness. I’m curious what this will mean for the next iteration of my practice.

All this goes to say that despite their differences, all three modes of making are vanishingly rare sources of focus and sustained attention. Not to mention they form much-needed hours of the day away from a screen.

And ultimately, they’re all transformative acts, in the literal - I’m building a new image from something blank - and metaphoric - I’m making something and doing something I have never made before, and will never be the same person afterwards** - senses.

Attention and transformation continue to be the keystones to how I practice art, no matter the outcome, or even the process. And I have a hunch that this will continue to serve me well.

*I had a career counselling session today where the coach (not an artist) queried why I kept calling it my art “practice”. She genuinely thought I was insinuating that I was a beginner - which is not a misconception I’ve come across before! At least, not to my knowledge. What do you think of when someone talks about their “art practice”? I guess musicians don’t say their “music practice” — or do they?

**Like the Dylan Thomas quote, which I think about more often than you might expect — ‘A good poem is a contribution to reality. The world is never the same once a good poem has been added to it. A good poem helps to change the shape of the universe, helps to extend everyone's knowledge of himself and the world around him.’