I had a phone conversation the other day with one of my mixed media students, and what I thought was going to be an informal art consultation sort of phone call, took a sharp turn almost immediately. He had just returned from a long trip overseas to spend a month with his parents, and things had gone nothing like he could have imagined. Circumstances no one could really control caused a lot of pain and sadness, and he told me he sat down with his mom and they started to make some mixed media artwork. Where words failed, he and his mom bonded over drawing, painting, and collage. At the end of his trip they had finished six collaborative paintings which they hung on the walls to surround her with these visual memories of togetherness.
He also had a revelation that art is for sharing one’s heart with other people, and the process is the point. Art is also a therapeutic, vital form of communication where words fail. He used the word magic. We talked about that a little. Magic is what I refer to as the sweet spot we always hope to get to when making art. It’s like lightning in a bottle, but we get glimpses of it from time to time as we work in whatever medium on whatever day.
I hope he doesn’t mind I’m sharing this, as I am leaving out almost any revelatory detail of what he and his family went through, and continue to go through. I am sharing it as a message of hope for anyone going through inexplicable pain, or even dull ache kind of pain. There are so many people going through varying degrees of pain right now. There is still good to be found, and when words fail, there are options that do not alleviate or change the situation, but they help, even just a little bit. Art is one of those things, and it can be profound.
With love,
Jackie
