How do you get yourself out from under emotional challenges? Do you use your creative outlets and/or something else?
As most of you know, starting late summer I took a sabbatical for several months because I needed to Prevent a Train Wreck. This time was followed by our much anticipated vacation to Barcelona. Unfortunately, it was rudely interrupted by the theft of all of our luggage from inside of our rental car as described in Thieves Among Geniuses-Miro and Gaudi. As a result of this traumatic experience, I have been experiencing periodic mild anxiety attacks. This was a surprise me and continues to confound me. Consequently, I have not been inspired or motivated to paint, much less anything else work related.
I had intended to return from our European vacation all charged up and ready to get back to work. Ha! My psyche wasn’t ready, so I have been patiently listening to my body and trying to take care of myself. Meanwhile, what about my art? As I mentioned in my last blog post, I asked a good art friend to push me to start a couple of paintings. I did and that was Okay, but not satisfactory.
This week, after a few mornings of mild anxiety attacks, I decided that I needed to do something different. Painting has almost always served as an emotionally grounding activity for me, but I couldn’t figure out what I wanted to paint! This is not a common phenomenon for me. Feeling lost like this indicated that I still needed some healing time. However, sitting around watching the snow fall (quite the snow storms this week in Colorado), wasn’t working for me.
When in a conundrum such as this, I often pose challenges for myself. I decided that I would use existing painting materials and try something I have only watched on YouTube. I would paint multiple paintings on one sheet of 22″ x 30″ watercolor paper. Here is the step-by-step process of my mixed media demo. [Read more…]