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*Age 58 – Artwork October 29, 2009

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I could wonder if my spontaneous, quick art work images will ever come out innocuous instead of intense and unsettling, but then I would be contradicting myself.  When I write about not believing images come from any invisible ‘inner child’, I am at the same time very aware of how people could interpret this kind of creative process I am doing as being related to having an experience with such an invisible entity.

What I know about how my child abuse altered brain operates helps me to understand my artistic process in a different way.  Particularly because my Borderline mother’s abuse of me began when I was born, neither of the hemispheres of my brain nor the way they operate together developed in an ‘ordinary’ way.  All of us have access to an unending storehouse of images.  The biggest problem is trying to get around our left brain’s inner critic, as  Betty Edwards describes in her excellent books about drawing.

Perhaps because of the affects my early abuse had on my developing brain, I have an almost literal switch I can flip, or a door I can simply open, that turns my left brain critic off and allows my creativity to escape.  I don’t believe my left and right brain hemispheres ever developed an ‘ordinary’ working partnership with one another, so I-Linda am learning that I can tell them what to do.  I can tell my left brain to just get out of the way, making an art image is not its concern.

There is no reason for any of us to worry about how we make our images, what they contain, or even what they look like.  To me, the important part of the process is simply to trust ourselves with the process of creating a representation of any image our right brain passes ‘out’ to us.  As humans, we have a clear inner sense of imagery.  What I really suspect is going on is that, as Alice Miller considers in her book I mentioned in yesterday’s post, Pictures of a Childhood: Sixty-Six Watercolors and an Essay, is that being an adult in our ‘modern culture’ makes us afraid of the image making process because we are afraid of what we will see.

Images cannot hurt us.  Giving them tangible visibility will not hurt us.  Most likely we will be helped, not harmed.  If we ‘give birth’ to an image that is intense or unsettling, all we have to do is put it away somewhere and keep it for as long as it takes for us to be able to be able to tolerate our own images so that we can witness our own expression.

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Every image has something powerful to say.  Because we are often raised, particularly those of us with severe child abuse histories, unable to stand in our own power as individual selves, it is often the experience of the power of creating itself that feels frightening to us.  Making art is a personal-power-enhancing process that belongs to all of us.  It is very simple.  We simply have to give ourselves permission and that whole world of making art is ours.

I am working with dollar store art supplies.  I use larger 5″ by 8″ index cards.  These ones happened to be included in a metal file box designed for that sized card I bought at the thrift store to save my childhood-related photographs in once they have been scanned and posted.  I like that size, though any size will do.  One advantage of choosing a size to begin an art image exploration series is that the limitation of size becomes a freeing factor because it does not need to be renegotiated as a choice every time a person begins to work.  I also have glue and colored paper, cheap paint, markers and crayons.  I am wishing for some oil pastels, but I don’t have any and that lack is NOT going to stop me.

I am, of course, encouraging every single one of my readers to get themselves some basic art materials and something to put them on, and go to work playing with their own image making process.  You will be amazed at the process and the results.  Show your images, keep them, hide them, post them.  One thing I strongly recommend is that on the back of whatever you make, always put the full date and the sequence number of the piece for the date you make them.  I can — and probably will at some point — explain why this matters.

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If I wanted to ‘work with’ my own images as an art therapist, I would have my work cut out for me.  They seem simple, they produce themselves quickly, but each one holds a universe all its own of ‘in-form-ation’.  I’m not at all concerned with that right now.  I only want to make them as a part of my commitment to myself to allow my self to ‘speak’.  I am eager to discover what this process has to teach me — both the process of making and the art images themselves.

But I do not wish to fly too close to the sun.  I have no intention of overwhelming myself by being too brazen about ‘digging out the truth’.  Whatever I do or don’t do, the truth already exists.  I simply need to get strong enough to visit it.

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