Art Therapy

God has been using Halloween to do some healing in my life.  Now, before I can tell you what he’s fixing, I have to tell you what was broken.  So this is gonna get sad before it gets happy, but hang in there, kiddos.  First off, I’ve always loved art.  When I was a kid, I took summer art classes at the DPN next door to the library.  The DPN is one of many buildings that make up “Historic Downtown Boonville.”  The other kids thought the building was haunted.  I just thought it was cool.  I always got pretty good grades in school, but the place I really excelled was art class.  All the way through, from kindergarten to graduation, the art room was my domain.  It was one place the bullies couldn’t get me.  I found peace, and I discovered my talents.  There were many times in high school that I skipped lunch, stayed after school, maybe skipped a class or two, just to spend more time with my art.  I really and truly loved to create.  Beautiful things that could brighten someone’s day, challenging things that made people think, silly things that had nothing to do with anything.  It didn’t matter; I just wanted to do it well.

So naturally, when I was choosing a major in college, I chose art.  I figured I could change later if I wanted, but I found the same freedom in the college art studio that I had been experiencing all my life.  For the first few years, I was good.  I mean really good.  My professors thought I had great ideas, I had other students in my class praising my work.  The cut throat art world my high school art teacher had warned me about didn’t seem to exist where I was. 

Then comes the sad part.  On January 29^th of my senior year, one of my heroes died.   My grandmother, Dorothy Mudge, was one of the most important people in my life.  She called me her “Precious Girl.”  When I was little I would spend every day with her while my parents were at work.  I’d sit on her lap and help her bake cookies, we’d fill the hummingbird feeder and watch as our friends flitted past the window.  I was the only person besides my grandma and my Uncle John who never once got snapped at by their shaky Chihuahua, Darien.

                

And my grandma loved my art.  When I was little, she’d buy me those huge art sets that had some of everything in it, and I would sit at the little table in the front room and draw and color and I would show her my creations.  Once I got older and more serious about my work I would bring my portfolio to her house and show her all of my new work.  She was so proud and loved every bit of my art.  Well, she loved everything about me.  I think if I had become a bank robber she still would have wanted to come visit the banks I robbed. She would probably have been proud of that too. 

                

When she died, I was in the middle of working on my senior show.  It was a group of ceramic sculptures that showed how clay vessels tied together various aspects and time periods within the Judeo-Christian faith.  I was very proud of my work for the show, and we were getting very close to the date of exhibition. But I had let some of my work slide in the weeks before.  I was having a really hard time dealing with the inevitable loss of my grandmother.  She was a fighter who had been through some pretty tough times and I think by the end she was surviving on sheer power of will.  When she passed, I was heartbroken, and I was having a really hard time dealing with the loss while being surrounded by people who didn’t even know who she was.  My friends helped to a certain extent, but I think a bit of the dysfunction we all share as human beings is the desire to understand peoples’ pain.  So instead of allowing someone to just be sad, we try to make them feel better by telling them we have gone through the same thing.  But every loss is different, and this one hit me hard. 

                

I couldn’t go into the art studio for weeks.  The work I had been in the middle of dried up before it was finished, and new work wasn’t being made.  I had a critique about six weeks after she died, and my professors tore me apart.  Not my work; me.  Every senior art student, and every art professor at my college were at this critique, and each one had something to say about how I was a failure and that I would never make it in the art world.  My work was a bad joke, and it was disrespectful and a waste of their time to show them the pathetically small amount of work I had finished since returning to school in January.  I probably should have stood up for myself, but I let them say what they wanted, and when they were done and all of the professors and students had left, I destroyed a good amount of the work I had made.  I got a call that night from a friend who had been at the critique.  He invited me over to his dorm because he and his girlfriend were celebrating our upcoming graduation by burning some of their old notes and papers that they didn’t need anymore.  He figured I needed to blow off some steam.  I brought over some of my concept sketches and some of the notes the professors had made about me that night.  We all had a lot of fun, and it took my mind off of things for a little while, but I decided that night that I wasn’t going to graduate as an art major. 

                

I scheduled a meeting the next day with one of the ladies who worked in registration and arranged to drop my art classes.  I had enough psychology credits that I could mesh those together with the almost-complete art major and change to cross-disciplinary studies.  I just had to take a few summer courses, which I was totally fine with.  And to be honest, my summer semester was a great experience, but that’s another story for another day. This one’s already too long.

                

Since dropping my art major, I have done nothing artistic.  I have not sat down to sketch, I haven’t painted, and I destroyed almost all of the sculptures I had been working on.  Whenever people have referred to me as an artist, I’ve just felt like a fraud and a failure.  It felt like I was lying to people.   I simply refused to let myself create anymore.  Until this past weekend.

                

We had clowns come to the shelter on Saturday to do a free show for the kids, and the kids absolutely loved it. But what I didn’t know was that one of my co-workers had told them that I could paint faces.  I had mentioned to her that I used to do that in high school to raise money for the art department, and she told them that I could paint the kids’ faces after their act.  So when they arrived at the shelter, one of them handed me a set of paints and some brushes.  It might not seem like a big deal, but after months of not picking up a paintbrush, it was a huge deal.  I was scared.  I wanted to go run and hide.  In fact, I did go hide in the office for a little while.  But once the clowns were done with their show, I grabbed the paints and sat down at a quiet table to the side of where the kids were, not announcing my presence, and hoping they wouldn’t notice.

                

I didn’t have to wait long before one of the boys came and plopped down on the chair beside me.  “Hey Sarah! I wanna be Spider-Man!”  So I did my best, painted the red face and the spider-man eyes and the spider web.  He even got a little spider on his cheek.  And he absolutely loved it.  And as is usually the case with kids, once one kid has something, they all want it.  So I spent the next hour or so painting toddler mutant ninja turtles, butterflies, leopards, pirates, ninjas, hearts, flowers, whatever they wanted.  And I heard from some of the moms and from my co-workers; “You’re a great artist.”  “I couldn’t do that.”  And from the kids, whose opinions I valued infinitely more; “That’s awesome!” “Can I get one on my hand?”  “I washed my face off so you can paint me again!”  It’s not exactly the Sistine Chapel.  And I’m not 100% back to where I was, but I feel like God’s helping me through the heartache of what I thought was the end of my art.  I feel like he’s gently pulling me back into the art world, helping me to take back what I thought was lost, and that’s an amazing feeling, because I missed it.

**Also, a side-note: After I painted all of the kiddos, I painted my own face.  And if you’ve never ridden the bus home painted like a clown, you should.  It’s quite the experience.