How speaking my truth helped me with my art style

Becoming vulnerable is the key to your art connecting with others

For your art to connect to those around you, you need to become vulnerable. I know this can sound extremely scary for some but remember vulnerability is not a weakness.

“Vulnerability is not winning or losing. It’s having the courage to show up when you can’t control the outcome.” – Brené Brown.

Courage is doing the work even if you do not know if you will be able to sell the work afterwards. When you connect to your art then others will too.

Through the sharing of my pain, the pain of losing a mother to breast cancer and being a caregiver for most of my life, I started to connect to those around me. Through talking about the conflicting feelings in an honest and ‘stripped bare’ manner, I allowed others to see that it is okay to grieve and feel all the feels. I cannot even count how many individuals reached out and spoke of how these paintings and my captions have touched them or helped them come to grips with their own grief. That alone makes all the tears, frustrations and struggles with painting this intimate collection all worth it.

With this collection, I decided the emotion I wanted to convey in the painting, then picked colours that conveyed that emotion too. Then I decided on the types of brushstrokes needed to convey these emotions– for example, busy, hard back and forth lines/shapes for anger or wispy lines, small dots and blended backgrounds for the softer emotions.

Then I would come up with the title before starting to put paint down on the canvas. Because the emotions were so big, I had to adapt my creative process to accommodate it. I tried to spontaneously paint (like I normally do) but it took too much out of me and hindered my creative juices from flowing. If you need to adapt or learn a new way of doing things for you to connect to your art then I highly recommend it.

I had to dig deep and go through the grieving process again to paint this particular collection. However difficult it was, it was worthwhile because every time you go through those stages of grief feeling those conflicting emotions, you learn something new. I learned that the personal leads to the universal and that connection to your art can bring true healing. I am more emotionally whole than I ever was.

I am grateful that I decided to take the plunge, tell my story of grief, and share my hurt feelings. I grew in so many unexpected ways in regards to resiliency, new coping techniques, and depth of understanding of my feelings and others.

 “Loving ourselves through the process of owning our story is the bravest thing we'll ever do” – Brené Brown.

Your story is uniquely yours. The way you grew up, the values your parents instilled in you, how the society you grew up in shaped you, the friends you choose in childhood and the company you keep these days – all mold you into the person you are today. Moreover, your experience is not the same as your neighbours or even your best friend’s. You have stories to tell, worthwhile stories, so tell them through your art.