’ve been playing around with drawing and painting since I was a child. It’s always been a way to express strong feelings without words and release them. I find it soothing and relaxing. I never saw myself as an artist, and I’ve been content to simply let color and form evolve on my canvas or paper spontaneously without worrying about its composition or form. I never had formal training, and since I am working less and have more time, I decided to go to our local art museum and take some courses. My goal was to learn some techniques and meet some new people in the community, and broaden my sphere of interests.
As a child growing up, my father would sometimes take us to Greenwich Village on a Sunday, and he’d talk to the artists whose work he admired, and I’d listen or wander around, fascinated by the scene around me. There were people with long hair playing guitars, and I imagined a hedonistic life of freedom and creativity. In my young mind, I fantasized that the life of an artist had a certain glamor and bohemian flavor quite different from my own experience living with my family in Mt. Vernon, NY.
Now that I am older, I am more aware of the gap between my fantasies and reality. My expectations about what I can or cannot do are not always reliable and require adjustment. My mind says "oh no," and seems to freeze, and there is contraction in my body. I get stuck in a sense of failure and self-criticism. This happened recently in my drawing class. I got frustrated with my rendition of a horse’s skull that the teacher had illuminated and placed in front of us to draw. We were using both soft and hard charcoal to capture shape, shadow, and light on paper. As I gazed at the skull, I thought it was quite beautiful, but I could not capture its shape or the feeling it conveyed. I got lost in its details and kept erasing and redrawing the same area of the head. The way my eyes perceived the head and how my hands represented it on paper did not match. As the teacher went around the room, he stopped at my image and with his expert eye immediately detected my stuckness. He asked if he could sit down and took my place so his view of the skull would duplicate mine. He smudged the charcoal lines I had worked on so many times, creating a shape within the skull. Eliminating this overworked area and simplifying the drawing gave a sense of wholeness to the head. He said that the details could be put in later, and I didn’t need to work so hard or be so self-critical.
I’ve always known I can be self-critical, but I never realized how much I want to get things right. I can tell others to listen to Big Bird from Sesame Street sing, “It’s OK to make a mistake,” but deep down, my fear of disapproval can trap me, and old feelings of inadequacy reemerge. Shortly after the class, I heard a lecture on the use of self-compassion in psychotherapy and how helpful it is in conjunction with mindfulness, which cultivates the ability to see things as they really are with acceptance. Accepting imperfection continues to be a challenge for me. It makes life much easier, but it takes time, patience and compassion and can trigger past conditioning. Change is not automatic. It helps to remember I am not alone in this struggle, and the teacher’s kindness was helpful. I need to remember I am a beginner and learning something new.
Change is always present, and as I age, it can be quite dramatic. I get surprised when my mind and my body don’t seem in sync, be it eye/hand coordination or something more serious, and I wonder if I can be accepting of my skills as a beginner in an art class and let myself relax and enjoy the process. I like to think this also applies to aging and the limitations that arrive with my changing body. It can be a surprise to discover that I can’t do what I used to take for granted, and I fatigue more easily. What are my expectations for myself? I know I will never be an artist like Georgia O’Keeffe, but what about Elana? Can I see the beauty of the leaves changing color in our neighborhood and not mourn their demise, but appreciate the life cycle and the crispness of the air? Can I put my whole self into the art of living and let myself make mistakes and begin again…and be free?
