Witnessing Emotions and Drawing

 Art is the way of living choices I make. Choices involving risk, acceptance, sometimes resignations and sometimes letting go as well as destruction. All those elements are present in both – artistic and life’s process. I can look back few years ago now and see how intertwining of art and life had been present in my existence. As I change, transform or same call it age, the art moves at the same time into new direction.

 

  Last year brought me closer to witnessing an authentic human experience than ever before, mainly by intense work in therapy with the clients. One to one work when relational depth can create a very intense witnessing of another person’s emotions, and actually ways they experience the world, really impacted on my own way of relating to the world. This in a very natural way leaked into my own art. I always have been interested and drew faces, figures or produced abstract work emotionally charged with colour. I reach for colour easily and I am not afraid of strong, bold lines. Peaceful fields and calming seas never really hit my heart. And to be true to ourselves we better off accepting our natural voices and expressions. Work in therapeutic field brought me closer to diverse range of human experiences, it showed me vulnerability, survival capacity, as well as power of personal transformation. As this have been happening my drawings have been changing too. I found a new way of merging working from imagination and reference – I started to work with invisible emotion, just like in the therapy room I would witness the intensity and capacity of human experiences. My mind stopped being concerned with the accuracy of drawing, likeness of the model. The picture served just as a vehicle, way of accessing far more interesting subjects of experiences on mental rather than physical level. These drawings were fascinating me, and artistic process quickly became exciting, like a new unknown adventure of using creativity for discovery of more meaning – meaning beyond the picture. It provided an opportunity to wonder, explore many images and through the process of immersing yourself fully into the art making, discovering what the images were truly communicating to me. When I create, I must go beyond just the picture, art is not the picture - it is what we can see and feel beyond this actual picture – shortly speaking – magic!

 

 

 

 

 

 

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