About two years ago I was in a dry spell. I couldn't produce art. Post-break-up. New job. No creative juice.
Time spent in the studio felt false. A lot of start-stop and not much joy.
I thought it might be a logistics issue. The commute between home, studio and work was a giant triangle, it was difficult to balance. Being practically minded, I moved to combine my art studio and living space. Yet art still felt brittle and forced.
The problem persisted. It wasn't geography, it was my inner landscape.
Over a self-deflating conversation, my artist friend gave me permission to not create for a while. "It's okay" he said with love, "to just let yourself heal." My art studio was now connected to my living space, but he was right. I needed space to not create.
I'm not gonna lie. It felt dark. I felt one dimensional. There was a lot of feelings inside and I couldn't express them visually.
I don't remember the impetus, but months later amid meditations classes and focused healing, I went into my studio and started to collage. No expectations, no pressure.
I dug in. I dug deeper than the sadness from the break-up, deeper than my immediate anxiety, deep deep inside. I got down on my knees and crawled around fences made of ribs, tripped over my veins, and into the crevices of my heart and asked what it wanted to express.
It poured out. I rifled through collage material. I glued, I smeared paint with bare hands...fast, fast, fast. All the symbols, all the feelings. Sketched imagery from journals years ago. Poems from childhood. I drew my original underworld. Darkness. It's where I learned how to fly away, how I became wild, and where I learned certain patterns of love.
The journal is still a work-in-progress, yet I revealed something powerful during the process. I sat with the feelings and the memories were given a voice. I showed them self-love and forgiveness.
It softened my heart and unblocked my soul.