🎶 I keep painting on my own ~
It's sad, really: We're shit at Doing Therapy as you're Supposed To. So we keep accumulating a selection of things that give us space to explore and to heal.
It's great, really: It is. It's great for us.
That doesn't mean it will be great for everyone. You know yourself best.
The quick scribbles, just filing a page with lines to figure stuff out. The scribbles that are part of routines – see the notes about the Observation Journal here. The desperation scribbling when everything is too much.
Currently, we try to do an hour of art each week. We set a timer. We get out our supplies – paper, pencils and oil pastels are our standard.
First, we try to get an idea of what kind of vibe we have going on. For that, we focus on this desire, take a pencil and fill a piece of paper with lines. We got this from Art Is a Way of Knowing by Pat B. Allen. If there's a theme coming up that we want to get more of an idea of, we focus on that theme and again, fill a piece of paper with lines. Lookign at those, and feeling what is going on with the lines, gives us ideas for what to do next.
Look, we love oil pastels. You can smear them over each other messily. So probably oil pastels are going to be involved. But regardless of the medium – we will now focus on some vibe, image, feeling or idea that the lines gave us, and explore it more. Choosing colors and paper size are part of the process.
We look at what we made so far, feel into it, figure out where to go next. We repeat this until it's time to stop. If reflection wasn't already part of what we did the last few minutes anyway, we will make some space for thinking about what just happened and feeling where we're at.
Sometimes, towards the end we we incorporate other forms of expression, like writing or moving. We love continuing exploration in a different form, and going back and forth between two or more of them. Taking the vibe of our drawing into a dance, writing about the dance, taking a sentence to dance about, drawing the feelings that brought up.
To be added!