|
Surface impressions introduce us to people-and to paintings. Our first reactions catalogue sights, sounds, and sensations. We instantly intuit likes and dislikes. Each new entity triggers a myriad of memories, connections, associations, comparisons, apprehensions, and anticipations. Patinas, like personas, reveal and obfuscate, depending upon the light on which they are viewed. Like a newly confronted pair of eyes, a canvas may hide various realities behind colors and shapes.
My long career as a psychotherapist honed what was perhaps an innate fascination with the elusive magic of psyche. My clients, who trusted me with the study of their inner lives, also challenged me to confront myself.
As a painter, I face an empty canvas like a swimmer plunging into dark water. Using the energy that comes from training, education, and endless practice, I struggle to pass beyond the familiar, the knowable, nameable, and recognizable to a place where passions blend with the lifelong river of daydreams, fantasies, and secrets that fill my studio. Here, boundaries combine, fade, and recombine until something emerges that is more of a feeling than an image. I ask for its name and it tells me.
I believe that one of the most important things a therapist can do is create an environment which invites, honors, and safeguards histories, hurts, hopes, failings, and triumphs and the connections among them. Similarly, I hope that my paintings, springing from various comparisons of my inner life, may be a welcoming and nurturing repository for some of yours.
-Helen
|
