My Story of Painting-Light Through the Trauma
Most of my adult life was spent being a proud mother of three wonderful children while juggling my demanding career as a media executive. Then the unimaginable happened. My life was turned upside down after the tragic death of my oldest daughter. Everything became pale and muted. There was no color. I worked hard to manage my pain, knowing that time would make the energy it required to hide my immeasurable grief from others slowly lessen—but I could not imagine a life where my grief wasn’t wrapping my heart away from all the lust for life that I had prior. It was bleak.
So many of us experience traumas in our lives and we wonder how we will ever pick up the pieces. Deep in the recesses of all our souls though is a precious attribute called resilience, the ability to bounce back after a setback, but we often have to learn how to access it, particularly in our most dark times.
I was struggling to manage through my days and nothing that I had done prior in my life seemed important. One of my friends came over to see me with a small children’s watercolor set. She convinced me to sit outside for some fresh air, and opened the paints, poured a cup of water, and ripped out a piece of paper and implored me to paint. I thought it was crazy and the last thing I felt like doing. I was annoyed. I didn’t want to be engaged in anything that would move me away from missing my daughter. I wasn’t sure why but it didn’t seem to matter. But this was a good and insistent friend and so she prevailed. I painted-or made marks with paint like a child would. In that moment of doing I was taken away from my pain. It was in truth a short moment, but for me it felt like a very long time. To be so consumed in darkness that even a glimmer of light felt like an eternity was something to be grateful for. I knew intuitively that I had to escape again-even momentarily. I mentioned it to another beloved and present friend who happened herself to be an immensely talented artist—one who turns anything she touches into art. She exclaimed that it was exactly what I needed to do. She picked up the pieces of my soul, and literally thrust them along side of her right into an art store where she proceeded to fill my basket with brushes, paints and watercolors. “If you’re going to do this you need to use really good quality-you’ll see” she said. She gathered up the supplies and we went to a place near the ocean that my daughter had adored. My friend wet the paper, and then just had me throw color on it and play. As I watched the color saturate the paper, and spread, and flow and move- I was again taken away. I saw how it matched the pain I was feeling and how the spreading and seeping felt like my own. How it started and stopped— never really knowing where it would end up.
Differing from my feelings though was how the color was flowing—that wasn’t at all a mirror of my emotional state. My pain was stagnant, immovable and far from My Story of Painting colorful. It was black. Now there was water and color-moving across a blank page and creating something unformed, temporary, and absorbing. It was movement and engagement. It was what I needed to escape in a healthier way and to undertake something productive was a good thing. I needed to rebound, I knew that, as my other children needed me desperately and wholly. And so it started. My painting.
They were dark at first—dark subjects, dark colors, sad. But it didn’t matter. It wasn’t important what I painted just that I did. I could pour my heart out onto the paper and could start to slowly squeeze out some of the pain from inside of me. I could actually be so engrossed that for fleeting times I could forget-or at the very least not be so preoccupied with what I had lost and begin to focus on something I had gained- my creative process. There were of course ups and downs, but painting and the expression of my emotions in something that could be obscured from the world, (as I didn’t show people my work), was healing. I was present when I was painting. I was involved with what was around me and right in front of me. Over time my paintings became more colorful, lighter-and dare I say, even happy. I was actually seeing color again, and lightness-but I hadn’t really focused on this as a means to that end. It just sort of happened. I started seeing the world in pieces of subjects for paintings-and I was ultimately drawn to the beauty and mystery in flowers and landscape. They became an increasingly consistent subject for me.
Eventually painting brought beauty into a sharper focus for me once again and as it happened more and more I realized that what I thought I would never experience again, had happened. I felt that belly flop with the fullness of the beauty in things. So without even knowing it my spirit went into resilient overdrive. We all use different tools when we need to rebound. Creative, active, meditative—whatever form it takes is fine. It’s the act of truly engaging, in a complete and authentic manner, that enables your soul to take a break from whatever the trauma, big or small, so that it can sew itself together and become that much stronger from the new stitches it required and acquired. That is resilience. That is the beauty of the human spirit. That is what my painting is about.