Healing thru art

I used to think healing through art meant focusing on subject matter—putting your emotions into a piece and depicting how you feel in a given moment. And while that can certainly be true, I’ve come to understand it in a different way.

I check the clock and it’s 4 a.m. The world is dark and quiet. My dogs and my husband are sound asleep, and the only sound is my pencil scraping against the paper. I blink and it’s 5:00, and suddenly it hits me: for an entire hour, I had no thoughts beyond where the next line was going. There were no racing thoughts, no insecurities. I couldn’t recall smells or sounds. I didn’t feel tired. I simply existed, creating.

Hour after hour, this happens. As long as my pencil is moving, I am fully present—and in that moment, fully healed. The healing lives more in the process than in the finished piece, and I believe this is true for most artists.

This way of working has given me the time, focus, and detail I could never achieve if I weren’t chasing my own version of a runner’s high. In doing so, the practice has healed not only my spirit, but the work itself.