Scattered pieces

The activity for this months Expressive Arts Carnival is to:

Draw or paint your breath.

On one sheet of paper, draw or paint your breath in the moment. Then, immediately after, listen to some soothing music (if you want), close your eyes (if it is okay) and focus on your breathing. Do this for a couple minutes and try to relax.

When you are done with the breathing exercise, come back to the drawing and draw your breath again on the other paper.

When I thought of this activity, I had a very preconceived idea of what I was going to draw.  I had the patterns and colours planned.  I was “set”.  In my minds eye, the two images looked similar to these photos that I took awhile ago.

This is typical of what happens when I do conscious breathing.  I become calm and return to a central place of being where everything flows.  So when I sat down to do this exercise, I went with these images in my head.

What I drew, was nothing like I intended.

The first drawing was very easy, and very symbolic.  My breathing can become very shallow, choppy and quick.  It feels like I have a huge blockage in my throat that prevents my breath from going down into my lungs.  While the exhalations are short and sharp.  There’s very little fluidity about my breathing, and I can be like this for hours or days if my stress levels are high.

After doing the conscious breathing and relaxing, I came back to the paper ready to draw my nice flowing swirls to indicate how centered and aware I was.  I used finger paints, because I thought it would help me to blend the colours and feel as if I was more in touch with the whole experience.  I had six colours to chose from, and was going to cut this down to five by removing the black punnet – black didn’t fit into my view of the flowing picture I was about to draw.  But there was a strong internal message about being a censor if I didn’t allow for the possibility of black to be used; so it remained in front of me.

I’m aware that I started off with a central core of yellow, then moved outwards to the other colours.  The next thing I was aware of, was sitting back and looking at the image below.

Not quite the flowing picture I had in mind.

But in that moment, this is what was happening.  When I relaxed, the emotions came forward and were expressed through the drawing.

I think the only reason that some colour remained, was because there was an internal conflict, or backlash, about erasing another ones work.  I know I took a risk in using finger paints, I could tell there was curiosity about them.  The last time I used finger paints was probably in kindergarten.  I was aware of smiling as I dipped my finger in the yellow punnet of paint.

What’s interesting, was that there was a need to eliminate the yellow colour first.

The activity for this months Expressive Arts Carnival is to:

On a white or black background, choose two (and only two) colors and make a painting that represents where you have been mentally for the past week or so. Feel free to use digital (e.g., Photoshop, electronic painting program) or analog techniques (e.g., paint, watercolor, colored pencils, markers).

While I’ve produced quite a bit of art over the last week, not much of it is safe for a blog. As a result, I’m going to go back to a previous piece of work and submit that instead. This piece was originally published under Losing control, and is a representation of how we’ve felt over the last few weeks as well… scared, frightened, isolated, overwhelmed, hopeless and beyond help.

The Expressive Arts Carnival will be published on the 2oth of August, at Mind Parts: Expressive Arts Carnival. Please check it out, and consider submitting something by the due date of the 19th…

—————-
Now playing: Split Enz – I See Red
via FoxyTunes

The activity for this months Expressive Arts Carnival is to:

Use any visual means (e.g., drawing, painting, photography) to represent, in an abstract way, your experience of all or part of your internal world. The key to the activity is to focus on an abstract representation. The reason for this focus is that it helps us to describe our experiences in a way that is not so familiar to us.

First off, I’m not good with abstract thinking or art, let alone putting the two together; so this activity has proven to be a bit of a challenge.

Saying that, here are our  attempts to represent what our internal world looks like…

Internal World: Part I

This one was heavily influenced by M.  It’s a very structured view, and I think comes from her place of being a little apart from the rest of us.  I think it’s possibly more of an abstract system map, rather than a representation of our inner world.

———————————————————————————————————–

Internal World: Part II

Well, our internal world according to Aimee and K (with help from Sophie)… They like the baby moose playing, and the mother moose always watching to make sure nothing will hurt them :)

I’m not sure if this is really a representation of our internal world for a majority of us, but I think it’s accurate for these two young ones… or how they’d like it to be???  They also love the clip, so wanted an excuse to put it on the blog…

———————————————————————————————————–

Internal World: Part III

In the shadows, waiting.

———————————————————————————————————–

Internal World: Part IV

Which leads to the final representation… the one that all of us agree to some extent represents our internal world, or a very important part of it…

Shadows…  The lower left corner represents areas which are in total darkness, while the upper right corner represents areas which are flooded with light. These two extremes are linked by varying degrees of shadow intensity.

This was an interesting exercise to do… Thank you Paul for providing the prompts.

—————-
Now playing: Five For Fighting – 100 Years
via FoxyTunes

The inaugural edition of the Expressive Arts Carnival has been published.  Check it out at MindParts.

It’s interesting looking at the different submissions… they each tell a story about the submitters through the topic of choice, fonts, colours, arrangement of words etc.  Take a look and maybe think of submitting something yourself next time… I was scared of submitting something, but still managed it :)

The beach has always been my retreat… my safe haven. Whenever things got out of control, I drove to the beach. I could look out over the ocean for hours on end, slowly feeling everything internally calm down. It is one of the few places where I can feel peace and a sense of safety.

So, this is my first attempt at the Expressive Arts Carnival hosted by Paul at MindParts. I’ll probably change it when I’m in a better frame of mind; but for now, this is it.

If you’re wondering why I’m posting this now, when everything is so out of control; well it sort of feels like I’ve let the side down by showing my dysfunction and weakness. Like I’m not playing the “game” of being a “survivor”. I realise this is possibly my own expectations coming into play, but there it is…