Art as Healing

I’ve never considered myself artistic.

I used to run a trauma healing group where the topic was different each night. One night each cycle was dedicated to art as healing and I’d always open that group by saying, “I don’t consider myself creative, but here are some easy things all of us can do…”

Then my co-facilitator would glare at me from across the circle and insist, “Yes you are creative! Even if you don’t draw or paint, you’re still creative!”

I guess after enough times of hearing it, her words started to sink in. I started to be able to admit that sure, I was creative in my writing…creative in the therapy interventions I’d use…creative in how I decorated my home…

When ten years later I opened my own private practice, I often heard from people that it was the most creative practice they’d ever seen. (It is pretty creative. I mean, how many other therapy practices do you know that are basically sleepover healing camp at a witchy cottage in the woods?)

So over time, I learned to admit that I’m creative.

But artistic? That felt like a bridge too far.

Then my friend Alison L Bradley started posting her tiny art projects regularly. Sometimes tiny in size- like the miniature collages she makes (I highly recommend checking out her Dear Friend letters about art to see them!)…but also often tiny in effort. Alison hosts one of the monthly book clubs I attend, and she’ll invite us to just create things while we chat. There’s something very soothing about snipping words out of magazines with scissors, or punching holes out of pretty paper with a fun-shaped hole punch, or even…when I’d worked up to it…brushing watercolor onto a page.

It did take me a while to work up to that, I’ll admit.

Reusing old magazines felt like one thing, but using- and therefore spoiling, in my mind- perfectly good watercolor paper with my unpracticed brushstrokes? That felt like another thing altogether.

Yet with Alison’s gentle invitation, I finally tried.

This is not a story, by the way, about my discovering some latent artistic genius.

Quite the opposite!

Watercolor has long been my favorite medium to observe, and here I will show you three of my favorite possessions, which happen to be watercolors done by three different amazing women who are actually artistic geniuses:1,2

I’ve been watercoloring for a few months now, and my watercolor art has seen no improvement at all, to the naked eye, at least.

But it’s made a big difference in my heart.

On sabbatical, I often find myself staring out at a pretty landscape…or even just at a pretty wall (let’s face it, even the walls in France, with their sheen of 500 year old plaster, are prettier!), and back at home I’d be tempted in those silent stretches to reach for my phone. Or if not my phone, at least a book. Here, though, I am trying to stay off my phone for most of the day, and to stay intensely present, which means not burying myself inside of a book, either.

That’s where watercolor comes in.

I can doodle and swish and swirl on the page to my heart’s content, blending colors until I finally have to get out and rinse out my cup to start again, and through it all, I’m staying present. Not only present, but attuned in a new way, as I try and capture the essence of what I see on the page.

Essence is a good word for what happens with watercolor painting, which is why this an ode to watercolor and not to say, painting with oils. Although if you feel the same way when you paint with oils, or color with crayons, or smudge with pastels, then please, be my guest!

For me, the translucent whisper of watercolor on a page, that can be lightened and darkened and blended over and over again to your heart’s content, is what makes the process such a joy. There are no real mistakes, in watercolor. (Except, as Alison told me, the mistake of using regular paper and not watercolor paper. And she’s totally right).

Most of my watercolors are big swooping lines, meant to represent the grasses here in the fields of Provence, or the clouds swirling in the azure sky, or the trees in the distance. My favorite thing to paint, it turns out, has been all these cobblestoned streets, mostly because I just make a bunch of grey dots (did you know grey is my favorite color??), which is immensely soothing.

If you haven’t yet experienced this soothing joy of which I speak, here is your invitation to experiment with watercolor. If you can, get some watercolor paper first- it will make the practice much more enjoyable. But if you can’t, that’s ok! Maybe experiment on a napkin, or a paper towel! If you’re like me, you won’t bother buying fancy watercolors- I’m using a kid’s palette, and it’s working just fine. Or maybe the fancy watercolors matter to you! As long as you use them, that’s the important thing. So go grab a brush, a cup of water, and some paper, and then make some swirls or shapes. Let your nervous system be soothed by the rhythmic motion, by the blending of colors. Let your parts communicate through the page, if they want. Let yourself create without any concern of what the outcome will look like. Let yourself simply be.

In our world of rush and outcomes, of results-driven performance measures…. it’s truly transformative.