Writing Workshop : Lost Art

Welcome back to your Writing Workshop!

At the bottom of this post you’ll find the widget to link up your posts – I’m looking forward to having a good read through them later. Thank you, as always, for your contributions.

First of all though, it’s my turn. I’ve chosen prompts number 2 – a part of my myself I lost and would like to find again…

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It’s strange how some weeks, the workshop seems to give me a prompt that is just what I need to say at that particular time.

I rediscovered a part of myself this week. Well, I am discovering quite a few lost aspects of myself at the moment, but this was an especially significant one for me, for this is a side of myself that was very, very lost. I thought irretrievably so.

You have all been so kind and supportive and encouraging in your comments about my art work, giving me strength to keep going with this, so, if you don’t mind, I will share the story of why I stopped. I’m feeling brave, and it feels right.

I’ve talked about confidence before on this blog, about it is always something I have struggled with. Thanks to this blog, and you lot, and special people in my life who have made me feel like it’s ok  to be me again, confidence isn’t as elusive as it once was. I’m actually fostering something these days that is feels something like self-belief, probably for the first time ever. I’m not perfect, far from it, full of deep flaws and scars. I fail a lot, and often. But actually, I’m alright with that. I quite like that. I quite like being me.

But this has been a long time coming. For a long, long time I had no confidence at all.

Art for me has always been a big part of who I am. I was always the creative one in the family, our house usually taken over with whatever project I was working on. You always knew where I’d been from the creative mess I left: splodges of paint, snippets of yarn and fabric, my mum trying to get the waste from erasers and endless rubbing out out from the cracks in our big oak table.

It was just how I expressed myself, along with words, although I lost those too along the way, pouring meaning out on to paper and canvas and the walls around me. Making some sense of what I felt and how I saw the world in the things I made.

When I got sick, the world stopped making sense for a long while. *I* stopped making sense. I didn’t understand why I was ill, why it seemed so hard to get better. As weeks dragged into months and into years, the magic ran out of my life in huge, rainbow runs like a watercolour painting held under the tap, leaving only grey, grey and more grey.

I felt worthless. I seemed incapable of functioning as a proper human being. Every time I tried to achieve something, I would get sicker and end up having to pack it in. Everything that seemed to make other people ‘something’, I didn’t have. No job, no degree, no social life. Just a pale ghost spending most of her day in bed. As much as those that loved me tried to support me, I felt very judged. They didn’t understand why I was ill either.

It felt like it was all my fault. Like it was because I was doing something wrong. Like I deserved to be ill.

I become intensely self-critical to the point of complete self-destruction. It was not good enough, not ever. I had to be better. I had to prove that I was worth something. And even as my body started to get better this remained. In fact, it got worse. I became harder and harder on myself.

At about the time that this was all reaching its peak, I painted a painting that changed my life. It was for my mum’s birthday. I spent two weeks intensely focused on the folds of petals, being drawn into its centre in something like a trance. I don’t remember thinking at all. It was the most significant period of just BEING that I remember. I don’t have memories of painting it, just of it slowly appearing on the canvas in front of me.

When it was finished I got very afraid. It was good, it was very good. Even me, so hard on myself, could see it was good.

My mum loved it. Everyone loved it. And on a whim I entered it into a competition.

It won. And from that exposure someone representing a gallery in Spain contacted me about producing a range for them.

And I panicked.

You’d have thought that this would have been everything I had been looking for, all the validation I had been so intensely seeking. But I was too far gone for that.

The pressures of self-perfection made it intensely difficult for me to begin anything. I’d convinced myself I would fail even before I started, that there was no point even trying. I developed the most intense case of artist’s block, too scared to even pick up a pencil, knowing I would never be able to paint anything as good again. Knowing I would just disappoint.

I began to destroy a lot of what I had made, entire sketch books ending up in the bin in a fit of frustration and despair. Canvases painted over. It was not good enough. Nothing was good enough.

A lot of you have been asking to see some of my work but the truth is that pretty soon there was nothing left, except the one painting that still survives on the wall at my mum’s and which I’ve shared a photo of at the bottom of this post – a constant reminder of what I could do but was too afraid to try at. A constant reminder of my weakness.

Time passed. I pushed down a lot of my creative urges, letting it out in ‘safe’ doses – knitting that followed a pattern, for example.

Anyway. You know the rest. You know I am being woken up.

I want to be the artist again, that lost herself in creating. I don’t want to be afraid to try. I want to make mistakes and smile at those mistakes and display them proudly. I don’t want to be perfect any more. I just want to DO. I want to go back to describing how beautiful I find the world in big daubs of colour, along with my words. For both are who I am.

And I will. Time are a’changing. On Tuesday night I looked down at my hands, black with charcoal, the table covered with my creative mess once again and I smiled a smile that made my face ache and my eyes run.

I’m not losing that again.

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So now it’s your turn. What prompt did you choose?

1. Have you ever had a holiday romance? If not, perhaps you’d like to make up a story where you did!
- Inspired by Nappy Valley Housewife and her wonderful post about a summer love (and yes, I sang Grease songs the whole time reading it and you will too…)

2. What part of you is lost that you would like to find again?
- Inspired by Toulouse Confessions’ beautifully self-reflective post.

3. Take a walk around your garden. What do you see there? Or tell us what you dream of seeing when you step out of your back door.
- Inspired by Kelly from A Place of My Own AND Livi from Livi’s Little Bubble who both took us round gardens, imagined or otherwise.

4. Write about one moment with all of richest, imaginative sensory description you can muster. It could be anything: something mundane, very domestic, or something more exotic and unique. I want metaphors and similes people!
- Inspired by Victoria at It’s a Small World After All and her description of what Summer feels like.

And finally, from now on the last prompt is going to be just one word, like last tie. This should allow you a bit more creative freedom if you feel like taking the safety harness that particular week.

5. Your word for the week is: Time
- Inspired by Baking Mad Mama and her retrospective through summer’s past.

Leave your name and the URL to your post in the MckLinky below (the URL should be to your post not just to your blog) and leave me a comment to let me know you’ve taken part. If you have the time it would be great if you could try and read and comment on at least two other entries. And be kind! It’s supposed to be a bit of fun – we’re not looking for the next Booker Prize winner here.

If you haven’t had chance to respond yet, then you’ve still got till Sunday to enter your link! Or just wait till next week, when there’ll be five brand new prompts to get you thinking.

This Writing Workshop is brought to you in association with Mama Kat’s Losin’ It – who’s lovely author came up with the concept and runs her own workshop over in the U.S.

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