“Emotions, in my experience, aren't covered by single words. I don't believe in "sadness," "joy," or "regret." Maybe the best proof that the language is patriarchal is that it oversimplifies feeling. I'd like to have at my disposal complicated hybrid emotions, Germanic train-car constructions like, say, "the happiness that attends disaster." Or: "the disappointment of sleeping with one's fantasy." I'd like to show how "intimations of mortality brought on by aging family members" connects with "the hatred of mirrors that begins in middle age." I'd like to have a word for "the sadness inspired by failing restaurants" as well as for "the excitement of getting a room with a minibar." I've never had the right words to describe my life, and now that I've entered my story, I need them more than ever. ”
― Jeffrey Eugenides, Middlesex
I don’t think I’m alone, as an artist, in thinking that I take a lot in. At the heart of my practice is this continual absorption, followed by expression. I don’t know what comes first — I’ve been feeling, and making/doing since I’ve been able to remember. To my benefit, and some days, to my detriment, I see, and feel things incredibly deeply, and these feels are nothing close to straightforward. This seems like a sixth sense, or maybe more accurately, the sense below all the senses —the meta sense. Beneath my mind, there is a set of stairs, and a door to the subconscious, the basement beneath feelings where they emerge. Right as they enter the realm of noticing, they don’t seem to be simplified yet. Like Eugeneides suggests, they seem to be more like hybrids. By the time they enter my mind, and head out my mouth, I’ve processed them, and like anything processed, they’ve been cleaned up and broken down. But there is something so precious, and hideous, about the recognition of them before they can really be named.
There is no end to the sources for input in the feeling department. These days we have the internet, and especially, social media, this open world/(wound?) of exposure to so many stories, experiences of lives and bodies not our own, and I don’t think I’m the only one who sees it all, absorbs it, and am left with so many complex feelings that I’m not always sure how to name, much less what to do with. This is all on top of my own subjective experiences in my personal narrative, which, like most people I’ve met, is enough to bear.
It is a beautiful, exhausting honour to be able to make art out of all these complicated feelings. Sometimes, the phrase “ignorance is bliss” pops into my mind, like a temptation to search out the green grass on the other side of the fence. It always feels like a longing for rest in a reality that isn’t my own. Being new on a grief journey following the passing of my sister, I recognized how important it was to process feelings, to try not to hop the fence. They always had a way of hopping over and finding me in the end. And some time later, I’ll admit that I’ve hopped that fence more than once. I still want, and need, to jump that fence some days. Sometimes the immeasurable sadness is nothing but crushing, and it feels sadistic and cruel to sit anywhere near it.
I’ve heard some artists say that they make art as an escape, searching for a bit of a relief on the other side of the fence, sometimes quite literally painting the green grass found there into whimsical landscapes. Others I know go down into the emotional basement, their ear to the cold surface, listening intently to all the rumblings below, painting without a need to show their work to anyone else.
I don’t believe there is a right or wrong way to process feelings with art. I’ve definitely painted and made art with both motivations. Depending on life and the circumstances, I think it is good, and very much okay, to do both. We can approach artmaking as a way to move through feelings, or as a happy distraction from them. Personally I’ve found that I benefit from a balance. I need to grieve, mourn, and lament. I also need to dance, laugh, and goof around. I’ve also learned that the proportions of these postures are based on a deep internal compass of some kind, one that doesn’t always seem to lead me in the same direction as the flow of the collective unconscious.
My creative headspace is something I can’t always explain to myself, much less to anyone else, and, thankfully, I don’t really have to. The feelings I engage with on an artistic level are raw, unprocessed chunks from the subconscious. I can see them, but I often don’t quite know what to name them. And let’s be real. They can be kind of ugly. The emotional equivalent of morning breath. Authentically me, but, not in a way I’d like to share.
For anyone new to artmaking, and perhaps, becoming newly acquainted with the strange/familiar forms these feelings take, I think it’s wise to venture towards them while also planning some good self care. And it’s very human, very, to want to hop the fence sometimes, and do a little dancing on that green, green grass. Those unsightly feelings will find you, yes, and they will call you back. They always do. The friendly monsters that they are, no matter how hideous, have their own stories to share.