Art - a Therapeutic Tool to help Process an Experience

I have witnessed Lesley’s creative journey over the last few years and I have helped her explore themes and textures in various ways. It is striking to see how art helps her process her feelings, so I have proposed her to write about her experience.

I let you discover how her wonderful creativity has been impacted by her life including her recent experiences such as the pandemic and a recent visit to hospital.

Nathalie

”Putting your emotions out there in paint is a way of coming to terms with them.”

”The first art work I can recall making was a tastefully drawn snail. It was drawn with my mother's bright red lip stick on her pastel blue, bed room, wall paper. I think it was at a time when my brother had recently been born. I must have been about four years old so perhaps it was my first experience with art as therapy!

My parents were quite religious back in the 1950s and they took me to services on Sunday. I think I was an inquisitive child and it may have been difficult to keep me entertained while the preacher was in full flow. My mother always carried a big handbag which she filled with a pad of paper to draw on. This would keep me occupied for as long as was needed. Often an elderly disabled lady attended. She was brought in seated in a huge wicker bed on wheels. Sometimes I would be placed at the end of the bed on a scratchy plaid blanket and I sat drawing happily and keeping the old lady entertained too. Well I recall her smiling at my doodles.

At school I always enjoyed art lessons. My formal lessons introduced me to painting with watercolour. I learned about mixing colours and perspective. I got on very well with my art teacher who set us some quite demanding projects. My class had to paint scenery for school theatre. This taught me a lot about drawing and painting things to scale. We designed the programs for an actual amateur production. The play was called “Light as Air” and this was the first time that I realised that colour and words can be related. The art teacher also entered the class paintings for an art competition organised by the local council. We had to paint memories of that year, I think it was 1966. I must have watched some TV programs about the war going on in Biafra, which is part of Nigeria. The war created a dreadful famine and many children starved to death. I painted a small black child, just in black and white, with a skull like face. Around it's shoulders I painted the draped banner that read “Miss Biafra 1966”. My picture appeared in the local newspaper. I supposed I must have realised that some artists do not just paint lovely chocolate box pictures but some use art to get over a message. Strangely in more recent times I developed a friendship with a fellow teacher who had come from Nigeria as a Biafran refugee. I had to try and sketch a little copy of “Miss Biafra” for her, which she reminds me could easily have been her back in 1966. At present I am working on painting a portrait of her. She still has a certain something unfathomable in her eyes which I feel sure is related to her experience of life. Will I ever really succeed in capturing that? I think this is the kind of thing that makes producing a portrait so difficult.

Art went onto the back burner when I followed onto higher education. I still enjoyed recording places that I travelled when I went on holiday. You have to sit down and really observe something when you draw it so it was a good way to take time out and relax with just that blank paper and a pencil. Once I took a tin of watercolour paints in my baggage when I was travelling on a flight to the USA. It caused a certain amount of consternation going through the baggage check system. However I was able to convince the lady who kindly unpacked and repacked my bag that I actually painted my own post cards which I sent home to my family. Fortunately I had a few sketches to show her! This was in the days long before 9/11. I wonder if I would get away with it today. My husband bought me a plastic travel box of paints to keep out of mischief. I still keep a journal and most recently recorded my garden through the seasons during the pandemic.

I had the misfortune to loose my husband to cancer in 1997. It was a difficult time and I ended up visiting a councillor. He asked me as part of my sessions with him to paint, draw, what ever I liked, to help me depict my mood. I painted pictures with reds and other hot colours to begin with. Eventually the pictures depicted greens and blues. I interpreted this as my inner thoughts becoming calmer. Eventually the councillor asked me to produce a picture showing things that made me happy and helped me get on top of things in life. In contrast he also wanted something that detailed those things that made me unhappy. I made two simple sketches. The first was the depiction of the tomb of Tutankhamen. The viewer is inside the tomb looking out through the open doorway to towards Lord Carnavon and Howard Carter. They are having the conversation where Lord Carnavon asks Carter what he can see. Howard replies that he can see “wonderful things”; the golden grave goods of the king and obviously treasured things. In my drawing I replaced the king's treasures with my own treasures. Family and friends became the family gods, there were flowers and fish pools, a globe of the world representing the places I have travelled and a ceiling depicting the goddess Nut in the night sky dressed with a spangle of stars.

My pictures for the most recent exhibition took the same theme. This time, lock down was represented by the tomb. Howard Carter and Lord Carnavon where still in the doorway having their conversation. This time I replaced the treasures with things that had kept me on an even keel during the pandemic, especially things that had made me laugh. Humour is represented by the leaping false teeth in my painting. Hopefully the more you look the more the painting will jog a memory. The composition took a lot of thought and I learned more about painting techniques. I had to research the internet to look at the Egyptian style of painting and find out how to paint bubbles. I had to give a great deal of thought to the light entering the tomb and how it was reflected around. The items in the tomb also reflected light. Colours had to be matched to light and dark. I tried to place more vivid colours in areas where there was more light.

The second painting that I made for the exhibition was called ECG. I must admit it is a strange mixture of ghastly colour and odd shapes. It is a mixture of only white, grey, blue and black. It depicted my recent visit to A&E when I suffered from atrial fibrillation. This was quite a frightening experience because I did not know what was happening to me. I had to call for an ambulance and the paramedics took an ECG of my heart's activity. It recorded that it was beating at 138 beats a minute. The read out was left on my dining table. When Nathalie asked us to look for some inspiration for a sketch, I spotted the trace and decided to use that. The trace turned into a strange blue and white head with spikey trailing lines in place of hair. This was the pattern the trace made. On top of the head was a bottle, spoon and a masked nurse! I have no idea why I chose to doodle this but as Nathalie later pointed out to me this odd combination did actually look like a heart with all of it's veins and arteries. At the top of the picture is the motto “Still Breathing”. In the hospital the doctor had said to me that he would take the credit for getting my heart back to normal. I replied that, if that was the case, I would take the credit for still breathing. At time of writing that is still the case. I suppose that this painting and it's bleak nature did allow me to express some of my feelings at the time.

To reflect back over the last two years art has been a very therapeutic thing for me to do. Putting your emotions out there in paint is a way of coming to terms with them. Humour is a tremendous coping mechanism. I think other people have laughed with the images I have produced which greatly pleased me and I hope may have helped them too. “

Lesley