Is painting therapy?
If I’m just painting, I become debaucherous, like painting my hair. I don’t change my clothes for days. If I’m just teaching, I become resentful because I’m not working on my own work. But I always knew that I would teach because it’s part of my Dharma. It goes hand in hand.
If you come to me for beginning classes, I have a program called Dive Deep, all about readings, the soul, the what, why and how. They make the work and really getting not just on the surface, but deeper.
I have a roots, rhythm, and ritual rendezvous of ways to help them enter into their own individual process, as opposed to them learning how to paint like me. I’m not interested in that at all.
For 30 years, I’ve had all these mixed media tools under my belt, so I can pull them out anytime it’s needed for any individual. Experiment wildly! Just let yourself pour out why you wanted to be an artist in the first place, and then the techniques start to get developed and honed in.
When I got my MFA from Portland State, they taught me how not to teach and it took ten years to unwind that because they all had their egos and they wanted their students to paint like them. It was really hard to get their voices out of my head. The best studio practice is a closed studio door because you have all those voices that you have to contend with, never mind the outside world. Shut the door and then you’ve got another layer. You take your mom with you while you’re painting, your dad with you, your first art instructor, and you’ve got to kind of unravel ever so gently all that stuff. Once you’re able to do that, then you can hear your own voice.
Taking care of ourselves in my Dive Deep program – I have these prompts, right? Assignments can seem so daunting. I give prompts, and I even say to them, if you didn’t do them, just show up. Let’s talk about where you’re at because I don’t want you to feel like in 30 days I must get this done. It’s not what this is about. It’s complete radical self-care and the holistic human being, the wholeness of self. I think those are shamanic practices. I’ve done a lot of breath work and a lot of therapy throughout my life.
Radical self-care. That’s what I’m interested in these days.
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Photo Aviva Nathan
