Everyday choices and painting my insides
I’m slowly finding my own voice through painting with watercolors. I started painting to wake up my creative side and to keep the momentum of my art making. Now it has become a calming joyful way for me to get in touch with myself and teach myself painting techniques.
The last few weeks that I’ve been painting, I meditate before I start. It is obvious how when I’m calmer, the painting comes out more fluidly and the process and final painting resonates with me. That’s not to say that I have it all figured out, most of the time I paint around 10 paintings before I end up with one that I keep liking the next day and feel comfortable to share. As you can see, I’m not painting a circle with a line through it right now. What helped me get out of those shapes was to look at an ultrasound image and then paint from instinct.
Now, very slowly, I’m starting to feel like the paintings are connecting visually and conceptually to my work-in-progress video and installation. So far, these paintings are inspiring the raw materials in those explorations. Conceptually I don’t know where this is going, but I can attempt to explain what activities, thoughts, and feelings are driving the work.
As an adult, painting has always been an intimidating medium for me, I never considered myself a painter, except when I was a kid. So for me, in order to paint and retake my video/installation work, there is a lot of inner work that needs to happen. Physically, I have been on a cleansing diet for more than a month, this has helped me with my mood swings, to have energy to work after my 9-5 job, and to sleep better, which helps me to deal with my mental challenges. Emotionally, I’m going to therapy more than usual and it is helping me open up and trust myself. All these everyday choices directly help the artwork process.
The artwork is an attempt to connect with my yoni—which carries worry, pain, and fear as well as passion, pleasure, and creativity—and to manifest how beautiful, fluid, and complex it is. The use of the raw elements—water, dirt and blood—in connection with the yoni images help me see my physical/inner self as part of nature. I see nature as something magical that goes through different seasons, it has the capacity to change and it always holds beautiful power within. I like to believe that this is also me.
The ultrasound images help to start the artwork but it is my insides—my intuition and trust—which guide and finish the work. I’m learning to rely on my intuition and trusting that it will lead me to a place where I am manifesting what resonates with me. When I’m filled with doubt and fear, it helps me to remember that “beauty is the soul’s footprint on this Earth” - ALOK. If I live by this, whatever artwork I manifest is beautiful by nature.
