I use my art journal to express and explore my feelings.
I had a massive stress headache over the weekend. Struggling to function, tried lying in bed in the dark and that didn’t help. Tried loosening up my muscles. Scott gave me a brief back rub and it hurt, my back muscles are so tight, it’s probably constricting the blood flow to my head, hence massive headache. Made this art journal page the next day as a response to still feeling hazy and fuzzy. The buzzing sound of my headache is still there hissing constantly in the background. So, I sat down at my art journal and wrote about how I was feeling. I wrote out the thoughts in my head, worries, feelings, emotions, concerns. Just poured it out onto the page with free flow writing, not worried about spelling, legibility, or neatness. (I always spell “creatively” why spell things normal?) This writing process helps in multiple ways including:
First, it gets something down on the page, so I am not staring at a blank page that is intimidating, and worried about messing it up.
Second, it helps me get thoughts out of my head, helps identify what I am thinking and straighten out my thoughts. Can sometimes help me identify what I need to do for myself. Like today, I identified that in addition to struggling to focus and think, I am still hopeful for the future and afraid for the future simultaneously. And it helped me identify that I need to go to sleep on time, and rest and not push myself too hard. Reminded me to take it easy with myself, and give myself grace that I’m not going to get a lot done, but self-care actually is getting something important done so I can get back to functioning better and painting more.
Third, the graphite interacts cool with the next layers of oil paint that I put down. Tonight I used oil paint and cold wax. Mixing up colors of white, buff, and adding cold wax medium and teal oil paint to both of those. When you use a silicone catalyst wedge to smear the paint on the page it picks up the graphite from the writing and blends in together, creating shades of grey. You can see some of the words I wrote as a cool first layer of texture, other words are blended and unrecognizable, and that’s ok. I don’t need to remember, or see, exactly everything I wrote down. It is the process of writing it out and painting it out that is helpful for me.