Ep 6 - Getting Over Art Block + Emotional Healing Through Creativity
Art block can feel so frustrating. No matter how much you want to create, it’s like nothing comes out or meaningless garbage shows up on the page - in this episode we talk about how art block is actually emotional blockages showing up in your creative expression. I walk you through what I did to get back into the flow of making work I love and the powerful way we can use art as therapy.
In This Episode Keita Discusses:
· Where art block comes from
· Painting your emotions and using art as therapy
· Why “bad” creative work is actually good.
Mentioned in this Episode:
DM me on instagram @artbykeita to let me know what’s helped you with getting over art block.
These are the “yucky feeling” paintings I talk about in the episode:
00:05
Hello, and welcome to the painty mama podcast. We're taught that artists are poor, throw kids in the mix, and it seems impossible to thrive. While balancing motherhood creative projects, and building a business along with everything else is hard. I believe the universe gave you your unique talents and children so you could live a full inspiring, creative, beautiful life together. Join me for conversations about creativity, motherhood, business, and finding calm in the chaos. I'm Keita Thomas, and this is the Painty Mama Podcast.
00:39
Hello, lovely. How are you? I hope you're doing well this week. I wanted to talk to you today about when you're going through a period of feeling blocked in making your artwork and it's something that many artists and creative people experience. And
00:59
I don't often experience it. But I think that's because I'm I'm not the kind of person that's really short of ideas, I usually have too many ideas. But I think that that can also be a form of feeling blocked. And I just wanted to share a little story with you because it really helps me through some really difficult feelings that was having in life and how art has really been a form of therapy and has really helped me to access parts of myself and get out a lot of the emotions that come with feeling blocked, because I do believe that art block is not just creative block, because creativity comes from you as a person as a whole person. And I think it comes from blocked emotions, and how art, the arts, in general, whether that's you know, dancing, singing, painting, creating, whether... whatever it is that you do on what however you express yourself, all those things have different ways of releasing emotions in your body. And I really do feel like creativity is such a powerful tool that we sometimes forget about to move our emotions around.
02:14
So into my story of how I started to create work that I actually liked, because I used to create work that I like, years ago, and then all this life stuff happened. And I first started painting after a few years of feeling like I wasn't allowed to, I wasn't able to express my feelings on my thoughts and opinions. It was a phase of life that was in. And as a reaction to those, like past circumstances, I'd started to feel this, like this blockage feeling to do with like actually sitting down to make art. But once I reached a point of wanting (or needing to draw actually is kind of where it comes from, at least for me. And maybe you can relate to that too, as a creative person), that I really, I just really felt this calling to paint again. And I felt really stuck, I needed to crack open a door that had like hammered shot and barricaded with a bunch of emotional junk for a really long time. And the problem I was having was, I'd feel like the pull or the edge to draw or paint something and I'd sit down and either nothing would come out or even worse, crappy stuff would come out, which really did not help my already like suffering confidence level that was going on with me personally at the time. And I couldn't understand what was going on in me because I knew that I knew how to draw. I knew how to paint. I already had the skills, and I'd done it for a long time before. So I thought as soon as I sat down, "I'll be fine. It's just like, you know, getting on a bike after you haven't been on for a while. You might wobble for the first couple of pedals. But it won't go on too long". But it was actually going on for quite a while and I was kind of beating myself up about it, which made the whole point of it worse because I was trying to draw to make myself feel better.
04:19
And it took me a bit to realize that my emotions were the thing that was blocking me and making art had always sorted me out so I couldn't understand why it wasn't working. And then anyway, one night after the kids were asleep. I got so frustrated with myself that I grabbed my sketchbook and I just started aggressively drawing I was so annoyed. And the first thing that came to mind was a rose. And I don't know why it was a rose. It just came to my mind. So I was like, you know, I was like with a pencil I would look like a psycho but I was just like aggressively and quickly sketching, rose after rose and I went to town with like all the hard lines. And after I did that, I felt like I needed more, even though it looked like my page looked like an absolute mess. And I, still felt relieved, though to get some of that frustration out.
05:23
So then the next night, I set up my paints before bedtime. And I decided just to get a canvas that I already had, get that out, set up on like my kitchen island at the time, before the kids went to bed. And then when they went to sleep, I was like, ready to paint. And I started to think, "you know what, I'm just going to paint the feeling".
05:47
And I know that sounds like a really strange concept, but the sketching part helped me to a point, and then I was like, "No, I'm just gonna, I'm gonna paint I want to paint I want to use color". Color for me is always evoked a lot of emotion anyway. And I use that a lot in my own work in my artwork to communicate. And I think as artists, we often do appreciate the power of color and how that can affect, you know, what you see and how you feel when you're looking at something.
06:18
So yeah, I sat down and I thought "I'm gonna paint this rose in the same way that I do my sketchbook. But with using paint and color", I actually ended up over the space of about two weeks doing three paintings. One was of a red rose, one of the yellow rose and one of her purple pansy, I think it's called a pansy. And they were so ugly, these paintings like I like the thought of looking at them now, (I actually ended up giving them away and getting rid of them. Because I didn't want them in my... I didn't want to see them anymore, because every time I looked at them, it brought up a lot of those really ugly feelings. But anyway, I did. I did those three. And what how I did it was I squirted out on my palette, all the primary colors in my acrylic paints. And every time I went to go and grab a new paint color, I would just feel what I was feeling. So if I was angry, for me that brought up a lot of red for the first one. So I was starting from a place of anger and suppressed anger. So I was I mixed a whole bunch of different reds. And then like, after that dried, (the nice thing about working in acrylics was that it dried pretty quick). So I could like keep moving through each emotion. And as that came up and ended up with this like really classy mishmash mess of an abstract canvas. And then because I had this rose on my mind, I just ended up kind of creating a rose shape out of some of the colors that hinted towards that like some of the shapes on the abstract, like I painted over. And then I created this rose, which gave me also that time that I personally like to get into the detail of something. So it allowed me to kind of sit in the process of being particular. And if that makes sense to you, it does to me.
08:19
When I'm painting something in detail, I'm so focused on light and shadow and you know, getting colors right that I do it kind of automatically and it almost got into this sort of Zen like state and I felt like it was a process of releasing and washing over some of those feelings that I'd painted in the abstract phase. And then I went over it again with a bunch of clashing colors. I say clashing, they went that clashing. But to me, they just evoked a lot. And I did the same thing again, where I was like, "Okay, so I'm going to let myself go back in and kind of wreck the painting a little bit".
09:01
Just to give myself a visual of how I was feeling. I mean, I should have put this together at the time. But I didn't until afterwards. And I was like "a red rose. I wonder what that's about. And it was about relationships". So that being like an epic, age old symbol of, you know, romance, the red rose. I just hadn't pieced that together. I just went with how I was feeling and what images - that image came to mind. So I just went for it. And I can't, describe how, great it felt afterwards.
09:48
Because I just let my feelings guide what I was making. I let the brush move in a haphazard way and get all the yuck out. By the time I finished the last painting, I felt like I had got it out. And then I could start creating work from a place of peace inside myself from the quiet place that I recognized. And that's where I actually wanted to get to. But I needed to clear a lot of this emotional junk out of the way, a lot of the anger, the frustration, the sadness, the grief that I'd been feeling for so long that I had never allowed myself to get out because I had to keep a lid on. And just that whole process, I can't tell you how much that helped me a lot. And it's honestly this episode is hard for me to record because I don't like going there. Because it's an uncomfortable place to remember how I was feeling then. But the reason I'm making it is because I want you to know that even if you are going through something really hard, emotionally in life, as we all do, at some point or another we experience difficult things, that if you are a creative person, you actually have the tools in-built already into yourself, you know in your heart, where you need to go in yourself. So don't be afraid to, you know, don't be afraid to make a gross thing. Don't be, don't be afraid to make an ugly painting, if it means you're processing your emotions that can help you to get to a place of not feeling blocked anymore or feeling like you've reached your your peaceful point, which is I'm guessing why you enjoy the process of creating artwork in the first place. And that I mean, even if you don't paint, I mean, you might be a painter if you're listening to the Painty Mama Podcast, but if you're a musician, or if you're a dancer, like let let the music be, you know wrong. Create discordant harmonies and let it not be your best work. Because sometimes you got to clear that away so that you can make space for new things that you want to experience in your life and experience in your creativity.
12:19
And for me, when I would look back at those paintings, it brought up so many gross, horrible feelings. But I'd given them a place to live that was outside of me, those feelings were then living on the canvas. They were living in the paintings. When I looked at them, I was reminded of it but it wasn't inside anymore. It was outside of myself. And I can't tell you how good that felt like the relief that came with doing that. And you know, I didn't finish I didn't stop at one. I didn't stop at the first one and think "Oh, right, that's it now, I've ticked that off the list". I just kept going until I finished that last one. And I was like, "Oh", I feel like the I the next idea that I kind of had for doing a painting was not... I didn't feel that tension inside myself anymore that I needed to you know, scribble it out or whatever.
13:18
I just felt calm. And I was like "now I want to create beautiful things". Because I'd made space for beauty inside. And I know that sounds cheesy, but it's just true. It's how I felt. And the reason I've told you this story is because I don't I never heard anybody else talk about art block this way. I've heard people talk about art block generally, and doing other things and you know, going for a walk and refreshing your mind and bringing in new influences and things like that to help with art block. And that's all true. But when your emotions are blocked, I think that the energy of everything gets impacted. And if you need your creativity as an outlet, sometimes it can help you just to get it out of the way.
14:07
So if you're experiencing some blocks as well, kind of like I was, and you don't know where it's coming from, and you know, you don't have to also necessarily be aware of the feelings or you know, have an association with the colors and know what colors mean to you. You don't have to intellectualize everything. You could literally sit down and start scribbling or sit down and, you know, grab your paints, but just give yourself like an ugly canvas or give yourself an ugly page. It's so worth it. And I'm no expert on art therapy. I'm not qualified in that or anything but I do feel like my life has qualified me to talk about how creativity can transform your emotions and help you to release things.
14:58
And also just to deal, because somethings, when we talk about healing, I feel like the general consensus sometimes is like, we want to heal things away, you know, we want to go to see a practitioner or somebody else to take away our yucky feelings or, you know, go to therapy, and then "oh, I opened that box. And then I never have to go there again". But part of it is also just learning yourself, learning what works for you, learning to live with certain pain, rather than having to feel like "Oh, I can't deal with this. So it must be I have to let it go. And never think of it ever again. Because I'm healed" and dust your hands off job done. It doesn't really work like that with certain pain. So expressing yourself and communicating whether that is through visual, auditory, like any form that you feel works for you, is usually the best way.
16:00
So I hope from this episode, you've got a little bit of an idea if you are suffering from art block, or even if you're not even if you've just got some difficult stuff going on at the moment, or you did have difficult stuff going on. And you can't seem to feel like yourself right now, I'd really strongly suggest giving yourself a little bit of you know, space and paper or whatever it is that you need to just to like just let it be ugly. And there's a greater appreciation that can come from Beauty when you have experienced ugly just like happiness and sadness. They're on a scale. And if you don't experience sadness, you can't reach happiness because there's no contrast there.
16:45
So sometimes we just need to paint it out. And I hope that you give yourself the chance to let it be yucky, make ugly work, so that you can release some of your emotions and I hope that it helps you too!
Thanks so much for letting me in your ears today! I really appreciate you listening and you being here. If you've got anything that you'd like to share with me about how you've cleared any blocks to do with your creative process. I would absolutely love to hear from you. And you can contact me on Instagram @artbykeita and if you enjoyed this episode, don't forget to subscribe so you can catch the next one and until next time. Have an absolutely beautiful painty week!
