Let me tell you about my painting process or this really won’t make sense.
A couple years ago, I came across “brave intuitive painting,” a movement and painting process started and taught by Flora Bowley, an abstract artist.
I don’t really know what led me to her instagram, but I’m pretty sure I was exploring #abstractart.
She approaches each painting without a plan, without an intention, and has learned how to truly tune in to her intuition and paint from within. She adds colors to her palette that “feel” good to her in the moment, she responds intuitively to each stroke and layer she adds to the canvas, making marks as she’s inspired and of what she’s inspired by, and she doesn’t stop until it feels done. In a nutshell.
Typing it out like that makes it look like it’s simple, and in a way it is. But in a way, it’s seriously not.
Because until you try painting this way, you have absolutely no idea how many thoughts you have in your mind telling you what to do.
How many voices pile up telling you how it should be, how things should go, what it’s “supposed” to look like and how it’s “supposed to happen.”
When you approach a canvas without a plan and attempt to paint without any idea of what’s going to happen or what it will turn out like, something really interesting happens.
First, it’s super fun. YAY NO RULES takes over for a little while.
Until you take a step back and look at the mess you’ve made. Until you notice all the weird things that stylistically don’t work, all the colors that got muddy, and the total non-direction of a painting you have going on.
Then, your critic shows up. It tells you how awful your painting is and how terrible of an artist you are.
“How dare you?” It whispers. “Who do you think you are?”
This is what Flora calls the “awkward teenager phase” of the painting. Where you look at it and have no idea what to do with it, and it feels super awkward.
So the brave, intuitive part comes in when you make a conscious choice to ignore what the inner critic is desperately trying to convince you, and you keep painting. Without a plan.
And then suddenly, when the time is just right, you step away to admire your work and realize… it’s finished.
AND THE MORE YOU DO THIS, THE CLEARER YOUR VOICE BECOMES.
I didn’t believe that at first. I didn’t believe that I had a painting voice or a painting style. I desperately wanted one. And every time I vented about it on social media, people would reassure me that I did indeed have a unique painting voice.
But it didn’t feel like it was mine to me.
That is, until about a year ago.
A year ago, I’d been working in this brave intuitive painting process for several months and finally feeling like I was getting somewhere, like I could look at a collection of my work and see my voice. Feel my voice.
And over the past year, the more I painted, the more I listened, the louder that voice became internally. I can actually feel it. I can look at my paintings and know what each color, each mark, each stroke, each technique means. It all comes from within. Something I’ve experienced or felt. Something I remembered. Something I thought about and questioned for days. Something I needed. Something I wanted. Something I hoped for.
My paintings are my heart on display.
This painting technique has taught me that I can feel the difference between the thoughts in my mind and the voice of my heart, of my intuition.
I don’t think I’d slowed down long enough before to listen well or understand it.
And I’m not saying that you shouldn’t ever listen to the thoughts in your mind.
But there is a difference.
So I’m sure you can imagine how I felt the day my heart voice spoke to me and told me to cut this painting off the stretcher bars and into pieces.
My head voice screamed!
“YOU CAN’T DO THAT.”
“YOU’LL RUIN IT FOREVER.”
“THAT’S NOT WHAT PAINTINGS ARE FOR, WHY WOULD YOU DO SOMETHING LIKE THAT?”
“YOU WORKED SO LONG AND SO HARD ON THAT PAINTING AND YOU WERE PROUD OF IT. WHY CUT IT ALL UP INTO PIECES?”
I didn’t know.
But I listened.
It took me a few days to follow through, but when I had the chance to find some quiet, alone time in my art room, I pulled the painting off the wall, sat on the floor, and cut the painting completely apart.
The painting was called, “Give in to the Growing Pains,” and as I sat there holding it in pieces on the floor, I felt two complete different emotions at the same time - relief and confusion.
It hurt.
And I thought back to why I painted it to begin with -
I had just moved to McKinney. I even used the fallen leaves from my favorite succulents, the ones that didn’t make it through the move, to create some of the marks you see on the painting. It was the first painting to combine both earth elements and sky. It held so much pain, depression, hope, and inspiration, all in one. It was the first of many that would begin to truly feel like “me.” And the name of it came from my heart gently teaching me that it’s okay to feel pain. That there’s always a pain when you’re growing. That something beautiful can come from a time a growth. That it’s okay. That I was okay.
So to cut it apart really hurt.
And yet, at the same time, it felt freeing. It felt like I was releasing all of the pain in the painting and freeing it up to be joyful again. And I had no idea what I was going to do with all the pieces.
So recently, as I pulled them all out to look at them again, I noticed something.
Inside each of those pieces - some big, some small - was its own little masterpiece. Each complete in its own little way. Each with its own narrative and its own meaning. I have never felt such a sense of renewed hope as I did that day.
So now I think…
Maybe the growing pains are worth it.
Maybe when it feels like your life is so full of so many things, things that don’t always match up or work, things that are crazy and happy and sad and tearful and scary and exciting, all at the same time, that actually it’s the sum of a thousand tiny masterpieces all coming together to make one whole painting.
That each little tiny piece counts.
Even the painful ones.
♥