Art Heals--Why Don't We All?
Art sometimes seems like an extravagance decorating our casual hours. Other times it seems emphatically vital. Combine the terms and think of art as a vital extravagance. Or extravagantly vital. We all get serious about how the sounds and colours and movements make us feel. And then there's an Irish reel called "Toss the Feathers." Whoop!
We know that we are born artists. At least as children we routinely, thoughtlessly, drew, sang, danced, told stories, and otherwise tried to express our curiosity, confusion, and awe concerning the world. As we physically, mentally, and emotionally develop, the formal necessity of these methods lessens. We learn to meet the world more directly, in what we can call the world’s language of everyday life. At night, tho, we still resort to the non-linear, indirect language of dreams. The subconscious must be heard.
Some people decide as I did to become artists. It begins with just doing art, on one's own. I did so at sixteen. I started writing poetry, Music and visual arts seemed beyond me then, writing natural enough.
My schooling had led me to believe in the slavish irrelevance of poetry. Thanks to the compelling model of e e cummings, however, poetry came with fewer expectations and rules. A novel had to have story and characters and all that, plus they take seventeen years to write. From such formlessness I moved, reading and writing until I discovered a path for my creative urge. I even learned to like poetry, guardedly, of course.
Now, I cannot say what healing my art gives me. I can only say that I needed to write, that writing gave me something serious and vital to surround. Still does.
Some people lose track of the creative urge that they felt as children. They stop needing to draw pictures of a person or a house to understand what a person or house is. They stay within the linear language of our lively world. I think the emphatic instruction of the subconscious may thus get lost. That's my Jung-inflected guess.
People often doodle when their mind's on other things. I did thru my school days. Years later, I took up painting. I like to think that when I started using good paper and paint rather than paper scraps and ballpoint pens, the results of my efforts transformed from doodles to art. Not necessarily good art—one still needs skill. Yet this sense of conscious application becomes an appeal to the subconscious. It's like saying to the subconscious: I want to know what you're saying. Art heals because we start to listen to that primordial voice.
We all have different skills and abilities. The idea of writing came easily to me. Writing had presented itself as a way of knowing for me. Others naturally turn to other ways. The thing is, you aren't stuck with one way. When I began painting, I found that the process for me remained the same. I felt guided by the same sense of creative source.
Art therapy uses the arts to help people express and learn things about themselves. Skill is secondary. The healing occurs in the act of creating. To draw, paint, dance, drum, simply these acts allow one to realize and perhaps release an impediment. You put aside the linear and enclosed.
Art therapy is indeed therapy, consciously-administered by trained and licensed professionals. Its value lies in the process not the product. Artists create products but nonetheless remain mindful of the process. The process is revelatory. This is the healing and vitality that art's extravagance offers.
I want to present a painting that I did a few years ago. I like it, and maybe that's a confession. The appeal of colour is almost enough for me. I know for many it looks like muck, I will never be a precision type. Nonetheless, it gives me pleasure to look at.
I guess I like it because it offers a bunch of thereness. I actually sat outside and painted what I thought was the actual front yard/garden. That grey column is the driveway. Somehow I didn't notice the house across the street. The bird, an American goldfinch, sat perched on a plant. The yellow around it is sunlight I tell you.
I show you this because not only did it happen, the painting, but it continues to happen. I disappeared long enought to let the painting arrive. It is still arriving. That disappearance makes a long step into one mindful moment. A bird surrounded by sunlight.
There.
You.
Are.
The creative endeavour concerns itself with just being there when the thing arrives. You are just a conduit. Realize that and you have made a healing step.