Painting with emotions…or not

I’ve decided to start sharing & blogging about my paintings again, after I heard another inspirational talk from Charlie O’Schields of Doodlewash during the Artwork-Creative Productivity unlocked summit organised by Nina Roycroft. This summit held many inspirational talks on how to keep a creative practise and combine it with a business. Charlie’s talk reminded me about how much I used to love writing so I’m back after a long absence! I also start a 100 day creative challenge with a few ladies from where I live, as I need that accountability and motivation to create each day. If you’re interested to join in with us, leave a comment and I’ll get in touch!

When I started this painting, which came from a wonderful course by Olga Bonitas I took on Skillshare, my go-to for inspiration, I was not in a good place. Her example showed joyful scenes of Christmas in the window, but I felt like adding a sad girl missing her friends and family over Christmas cause of COVID in the main window, and a silhouette of a pair of legs hanging in the air… in the window above. Yes really dark isn’t it. Don’t worry, I have no suicidal or self harm tendencies, but I wanted to convey the despair and sadness I felt creeping up on me, like the foggy and cold days of winter. I was dealing with constant aches and pains from my knee and back, the really bad mood swings of my teenage daughter and my son studying (or lack of) for his final year of the IB…and the passive stress of COVID in the background but ever present.

As I continued with the painting, as expected, my dark mood lifted and I felt much better. Painting the bricks especially was so meditative. Just putting one uneven, imperfect brick after the other, even the colours just mixed themselves to lovely blends. Yet when I reached the time to add the images in the windows, I was still torn about adding the hanging feet or not. The reason being that I rarely paint with emotion. I usually paint by “copying” a photo I took or found online or follow an example a fellow artist shared in a class. Sometimes I paint still life but I still try to paint it exactly as I see it instead of giving it my artistic rendition. So here I was, finally motivated to paint something that came out of my emotions, but the image I wanted to paint was so dark that I was afraid of the reaction I would get once I posted it online. So I decided against it.

Thinking about it now, I regret not going with my emotions. I could have just kept it for myself or if I hated looking at it after I painted it, I could just tear it up. It’s just paper after all. (Although I know it’s not, it’s a little piece of ourselves, especially when we add emotions in them.)

Cause life is not all smiles and happy days, especially now. I know it’s better to have uplifting beautiful images and stories to share, but sometimes, you just want to cry and say you’re sad, and as an artist we should have the right to express it in our paintings too right?

Anyway, thanks for reading this to the end and I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments.

Gwendolyn