done exactly what I did with my liberal arts education at Alma College. But in addition to the depth of English, sociology, and women’s studies courses, I would have taken some art classes. When I reflect back on my interests back then, I think about the mixed media artwork I enjoy dabbling in now, and what it might have looked like back then. I imagine my idealistic activist heart being splashed all over pages and canvases in bright hues. Quotes from Martin Luther King, Jr., Alice Walker, the lyrics of Tracy Chapman – splashed onto pages painted with swirls and swerves of color. I did actually do a little art journaling – particularly as a sophomore – I was broken-hearted over a boy‘s rejection of me. I was stuck in a self-deprecating circle of [literal] sophomoric angst, so the colors were black, grey and blood red. My poems were dark and sad – so much so that both my sister and Roseanne checked in with me, to ensure that I was ok, reminding me of who I was. Pulling me away from the painful pity party.
"Art is a wound
turned into light."
-Braque
The following year, I delved into Native American literature reading about the Lakota and their culture. I imagine canvas filled with burnt sienna, deep rusty orange, more red – and perhaps, the deep maize-yellow of a summer’s sun. The music and culture of my African American literature courses would have splashed in even more colorful hues – my mind races a bit, creatively imagining that mixed media and graphic design might have been useful mediums. I imagine use of archived newspaper stories alongside the coffee brown beauty of the colorful souls I was reading about – I see purple, magenta, indigo – perhaps gritty jade green. I hear jazz and blues and funk. I think of getting buzzed on ice cold hurricanes, swimming in passion fruit juice.
I didn’t quite find myself making ‘art’ until I was in my mid-twenties. Sure – there were plenty of handmade projects along the way – slips of paper painted in electric blue, reminding me of a mantra I wanted to keep close at hand, top of mind… “Risk” and “Carpe Diem” were the mantras of that time. I would make handmade greeting cards – more out of necessity than anything, but it was certainly a joy. I was a devout journal scribbler, filling pages with angst over one man or another and the constant want to sort out what it was I wanted to do with myself… How would I answer Mary Oliver's question: "Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?"
What was my answer to Oliver's question?
My “art” was also in the way I cooked, the way I tried to cultivate a bohemian lifestyle and environ, wherever I found residence. It was evident in the way that I tried to dress mixing vintage with contemporary, trying to find my own way to suit my own shape, rebelling against convention, but in my first-born, polite sort of way.
If I were to do a cursory mental review of my life, I would find peaks and valleys pertaining to my level of contentment. I’m certain that in those peaks, I could glance left and right to the day being surveilled and find myself enrapt in some idiosyncratic enjoyment – tidying a rock collection with polish, weeding a tiny back deck container garden, painting one wall in a rental indigo-purple, collecting bright blue glass and arranging it in my basement apartment window sill, singing while baking a favorite chocolate chip cookie recipe – soon to be delivered to someone, getting lost in Joni Mitchell’s A Case of You on repeat while painting the first piece of art that really felt like something beyond a whimsical note card.
Those happy peaks would probably be found after sitting in circles with my book club gang “the whoopsadaisies literary aficionados and rose petal tea party circle”. They most certainly were after sitting in painting circles with my tribe over the past decade – were diving into ouw own sources of escape – laughing, sometimes crying, exploring new terrain gaining new ground.
Probably eight or so years ago I learned about
a career path – Art Therapy or Expressive Art Therapy or Intuitive Art Therapy. My naiveté about what the world had to offer me happened a lot the first couple of years after I graduated from college – I met new friends who were doing things I had no idea were actual careers – I remember wondering how the heck was any 18-year-old supposed to know what direction to take when they might not have a clue as to what’s even there for the taking!?!