Writing snippets of memories and feelings down into lines poetry has brought clarity to my creative process. These stanzas then help form my art journal pages and quick sketches which ultimately become my larger abstracts. The process of sitting with my feelings and exploring concepts from various perspectives allows for layered and interesting pieces to emerge.
I do not journal in the traditional sense, as I do not find it relaxing at all. Ask me to write down my thoughts or daily happenings (even if it is stream of consciousness), that's the least enjoyable activity for me. It feels like a chore. And I do not like chores. I am not a journaler but I do enjoy dissecting my feelings and thoughts. How I do this is through creative explorations and writing snippets of poems on what I'm feeling.
Here's a portion of the poem I wrote after I got a tattoo in memory of my mother - if you knew her you would know that this act alone would have her shacking her head as she was completely against tattoos. I felt the need to document this moment in my life not just on my soul but also on my body to remind me of the impact losing my mother had on my life and me. Here's a snippet from the poem that I wrote as I wrestled with these conflicting emotions:
As I explore new feelings and concepts, I do research or I sit with the emotion and explore the situation in various ways. I relive the experience, I examine it from all points of view and I remember the good, bad and in-between moments. Then I write a snippet of my thoughts down and grab either pencils, inks or coloured paint to get the broad strokes down. Sometimes a journal page is created, sometimes it’s a painting or other times it’s a series of paintings born from this exercise. This is how I filter and pull back the layers of emotions I’m feeling. There is always a surface emotion (which often more than not is not the base or core emotion) and for me to heal and move on I need to understand where that feeling or reaction came from. If I’m angry or upset with someone, why is that? Did they say something that shakes my foundation of core beliefs or did they see me in a way that I do not see myself? What triggered this surface emotion to bubble up?
This next snippet is when a driving force in my life made me feel angry at the situation I found myself in. Through exploration and sitting with this anger, I realized I felt betrayed and not valued in my opinion by this situation and therefore I wrote the following poem:
When I decided to do my portfolio collection on my grief of losing a mother to cancer, I started with reliving my good memories first to prepare myself for digging deeper and exploring the harsher emotions of grief. I started remembering the good times, the fond memories of family vacations in Umhlanga and the connections built that held us together in our long journey of loss. Here’s the snippet I wrote while exploring these memories:
My first painting within the “A Path without a Mother” Collection was created from this snippet. I used colours that reminded me of the ocean and the décor in our timeshare in Umhlanga and the shapes represented the waves crashing onto the long beaches and the many hopscotch courses we drew into the sand and played throughout our vacations. These are some of my fondest memories growing up because there was so much laughter in the midst of a childhood tainted by cancer. Here’s a look at the painting that was created.
This process of examining my emotions is what kept me sane through some difficult times. It allows me to explore in a safe space the feelings I fear and the concepts that cut deep to leave invisible scars on my soul. With this next collection, I decided to explore the concept of expectations placed on us as a gender, society and creative. I am a foreigner, a South African, a prairie Canadian, a middle child, and a woman, which means I have many conflicting expectations placed on me. Some are welcomed while others are burdened and ultimately rejected. I’m examining these conflicting emotions while pushing my artistic skills further with painting portraits and gestural paintings that represent these versions of ourselves that butt against one another. Here’s a snippet of my thoughts with some of the paintings I’m preparing to paint.
