art therapy

Coming of age

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Last weekend I participated in a local artist’s tour with two friends with whom I share studio space. We are not very commercial, as artists go – we all draw and paint subjects we deeply believe in, but don’t necessarily seek to sell our work. Some of them won’t call themselves artists, but I do, because art is one of the few realms in which nudity is tolerated. If you’ve seen this blog before, you may recognize how therapeutic this self-portraiture process is for me, and I know it can be so for others. For years I dreamt of getting an art therapy degree, but I decided instead to maintain my status simply as an artist, because it is freer, and the people I work with can decide for themselves where to place boundaries on what is most comfortable and ethical for them in respect to drawing or photographing the body.

The exhibition is called Self-portraitrure to honour the body and consists of twenty drawings of myself, nude, over a period of twenty years. Twenty years I’ve been doing this! It was suprisingly easy to choose some favourites from nearly two hundred drawings produced over this time. Instead of showing the originals, I did some page make-up to present two similar drawings side by side, and to express in writing what was going on during each period and how photographing and drawing my body changed things for me.

I speak of negative self-image, disordered eating, weight gain and menopause, but I also share how liberating it is to photograph myself and learn to honour my body from different perspectives during the drawing process. A friend who visited made the observation that the subject is very intimate, and yet at the same time, universal. I saw some people read passages that brought tears to their eyes, and others said they recognized themselves in my stories. A few turned away, uncomfortable, but the majority took the time to understand why I do this, and I hope it left them with the notion that all bodies can be perceived as beautiful, or at the very least, as something worth honouring.

This showing was a big deal for me because it is a cumulation (but not the end) of twenty years of work, and it was the first time that I was ready and comfortable enough to share it locally. As yet I have only done so anonymously on this blog. I recently cut some professional ties that were holding me back, and with time, the process has matured. It feels good to finally be boldly transparent about what I do and why.

Please email me at madaboutmybody@gmail.com if you’d like to see a PDF version of the exhibit. Your feedback and comments are as always greatly appreciated!

Drawing the body even if you think you can’t draw

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Drawing is really about seeing. What people enjoy about looking at art is simply seeing things in new ways, from someone else’s perspective, different than ours. But so many of us have this learned belief that you’re either an artist or not, you can sing or you can’t, you’ve got talent or you just don’t. But it isn’t black and white. Talent, desire, interest or a natural inclination towards creative activities certainly help, but there are still skills involved that need to be learned and practiced.

The body is made of up a series of shapes, just like a building or a landscape, and if we break it down it’s much less daunting… the head is an oval, arms and legs are basically sticks, the torso a block and fingers and toes smaller sticks. If we can give ourselves permission to try, humbly enough to not immediately expect exceptional results, we can all learn and improve our skills as our brain starts to see the lines, curves and shapes that make up the overall picture. Then everything around us can be turned into a picture!

This is my husband playing air guitar in the kitchen as he listened to his favorite tunes while cooking. While you can’t see the dynamism of his movements (he was really rocking it!), I managed to capture his form in the simplest way possible… his head is an egg-shaped oval, his arms bent sticks, and his fingers just smaller, curved sticks bent into action.

The drawings on this site, all mine, are mostly copied from photographs, because my process and my practice were about learning to see my body differently and to accept myself the way I am. I got good at it because I’ve been doing it for twenty years! But I want to make the process accessible, as my drive is to invite others to try this process. Because I want them to know the relief I have known from the self-judgement that kept me down for so many years! But obviously, it needs to be accessible.

I am taking a course to learning to draw without tracing photos. It’s a different process, and so I will do my best to share that process here. So even if you think you can’t draw (believe me, I sometimes think that too!) you will see that we can all, at the very least, learn to see… our bodies, and our lives… differently.