The Beautiful Things: Healing Pain Through Art
Some of the most beautiful things I have ever created did not begin in beautiful places.
They began in disappointment.
In grief.
In uncertainty.
In the kind of hurt that sits quietly inside you long after the conversation has ended, the person has left, the opportunity has disappeared, or life has moved forward as though nothing happened.
People often see the finished thing.
They see the colors.
The flowers.
The patterns.
The strange landscapes and fantastical creatures.
They see a sweatshirt, a pair of pants, a painting, a print, a photograph, a room, a garden, a beautifully arranged table.
What they cannot necessarily see is what came before it.
Sometimes beauty is simply beauty.
And sometimes beauty is where we put the pain.
When There Are No Words for It
There are experiences that are easy to explain.
And then there are the others.
The ones that cannot be neatly summarized because the feeling is larger than the language available to describe it.
Sometimes you are sad, but sadness is not quite the right word.
Sometimes you are angry, but underneath the anger is disappointment.
Underneath the disappointment is grief.
Underneath the grief is love.
And underneath all of it may be a thousand things you never said.
Art gives those things somewhere to go.
You do not have to explain a color.
You do not have to justify a brushstroke.
You do not have to defend why a particular image keeps appearing in your work.
You can choose a flower because you need softness.
You can choose red because something inside you is screaming.
You can build an entire imaginary world because, for a little while, the real one has become too heavy.
The page does not interrupt.
The canvas does not argue.
The fabric does not tell you that you should be over it by now.
You simply create.
And sometimes that is enough to begin.
Making Something With What Hurt
I have always been drawn to beautiful things.
Not necessarily expensive things.
Beautiful things.
Interesting things.
Unexpected things.
Colors placed beside one another in ways that make you stop.
Objects that carry evidence of the person who made them.
Old architecture.
Nature and butterflies.
Textiles.
Flowers.
Art.
Faces.
Pattern.
Light.
Tiny details that someone else might walk past without noticing.
For me, making art has often been a way of gathering those fragments and arranging them into another reality.
There is something almost miraculous about that process.
You can begin the day carrying something painful and, several hours later, there is an object in front of you that did not exist before.
The pain may still be there.
But now something else exists too.
That matters.
You have made something.
You have taken an experience that felt as though it was only taking from you and used part of it to create.
That does not erase what happened.
It does not turn something terrible into something wonderful.
And I do not believe every painful experience needs to become a lesson.
Some things simply hurt.
But creation changes the relationship.
The wound is no longer the only thing in the room.
There is also the beautiful thing you made beside it.
I found a creative and healthy way in order to process and often take the place of whatever the distraction had been.
Art Does Not Ask You to Pretend
There is a version of healing that people sometimes present as though the goal is to become untouched by what happened.
To forgive immediately.
To release it.
To think positively.
To move on.
But human beings do not always heal in straight lines.
Some wounds close and reopen...even daily.
Some things we make peace with intellectually long before our hearts catch up.
Sometimes you can understand exactly why something happened and still wish desperately that it had happened differently.
Art makes room for those contradictions.
A piece can be beautiful and sad.
Joyful and angry.
Soft and unsettling.
It can carry longing and hope in the same image.
That is one of the things I love most about creating.
I do not have to decide which emotion is the correct one before I begin.
They can all come.
Beauty Can Be an Act of Defiance
There are moments when making something beautiful can feel almost rebellious.
Something hurt me.
And I made flowers.
Something disappointed me.
And I made color.
Something ended.
And I started another piece.
The world was ugly to me for a moment, and my response was not to become ugly with it.
I made something beautiful.
That does not mean ignoring injustice, betrayal, cruelty, disappointment, or grief.
Beauty is not denial.
Sometimes creating beauty is the refusal to allow pain to have the final word.
The world does not get to decide that because something broke your heart, everything that comes afterward must also be broken.
You are still allowed to notice sunlight.
You are still allowed to laugh.
You are still allowed to wear something extraordinary.
You are still allowed to decorate the room.
You are still allowed to plant the flowers.
You are still allowed to dream.
You are still allowed to make the beautiful things.
My Art Often Begins With Pieces
My design process is rarely about taking one image and placing it onto a garment.
I layer.
I combine.
I move things around.
I change scale.
I pull pieces from different visual worlds and find a way to make them speak to one another.
A flower may sit beside geometry.
An animal may wander into a dreamscape.
A historical reference may appear alongside something contemporary.
A tiny pattern may become enormous.
Something that began in one collection may unexpectedly find its way into another.
Perhaps there is a reason I am drawn to this way of working.
Healing is a little like that too.
We rebuild ourselves from pieces.
The person we were.
The person we thought we would become.
What happened.
What we lost.
What remained.
What we learned.
What we refused to lose.
And then, slowly, we rearrange those pieces.
Not necessarily back into what existed before.
Sometimes into something entirely new.
You Do Not Have to Be an Artist
I think people sometimes hear the word artist and immediately decide it belongs to someone else.
The painter.
The sculptor.
The musician.
The person with the studio.
The person whose work hangs in a gallery.
For a long time, I did the same thing.
Other people would call me an artist, and I would deny it.
Not modestly, either. I was almost embarrassed by the idea that someone might consider me one. Calling myself an artist felt presumptuous, as though I were claiming a title I had not earned. There were people who had gone to art school. People who had spent their entire lives painting. People represented by galleries and museums. Those were artists.
Me?
I made things.
At least, that was the distinction I created in my own mind.
Looking back, I recognize a lot of that as imposter syndrome. I was already creating art while simultaneously convincing myself that I did not have permission to call it art. Other people could see something in my work that I was not yet comfortable acknowledging in myself.
I felt like a fraud before I had even claimed the title.
It took me a while to understand that art—and specialty—comes in many forms.
There isn't one approved path into creativity. There isn't a committee somewhere deciding whose hands are sufficiently talented, educated, experienced or credentialed to make something meaningful.
And being creative does not require you to call yourself an artist at all.
Maybe you paint.
Maybe you sew.
Maybe you cook.
Maybe you photograph flowers during your morning walk.
Maybe you make jewelry.
Maybe you arrange your books by color because something about seeing those colors together makes you happy.
Maybe you write songs nobody will ever hear.
Maybe you build furniture.
Maybe you grow roses.
Maybe you make quilts from clothing that belonged to someone you loved.
Maybe you decorate cakes.
Maybe you write three sentences in a journal before bed.
Maybe you put on music and move your body around the kitchen while dinner is cooking.
There is creativity in all of it.
There is creativity in choosing ingredients and imagining what they might become. In selecting fabrics. In arranging flowers. In noticing light. In deciding where one color should sit beside another. In writing a sentence that manages to say something you have never quite been able to say aloud.
There is creativity in solving problems with your hands.
There is creativity in making something ordinary more beautiful, more useful, more interesting, or simply more you.
Some people develop extraordinary specialties without ever thinking of themselves as artists. They bake. Garden. Sew. Photograph. Decorate. Restore. Build. Write. Dance. Style. Arrange. Design. Invent.
The label matters far less than the impulse.
You saw something that did not exist yet, and some part of you wanted to bring it into the world.
That counts.
It does not have to become a business.
It does not have to become content.
It does not have to be posted.
Nobody has to buy it.
Nobody even has to see it.
And you certainly do not need someone else's permission to decide that what you make has value.
I eventually became comfortable saying that I am an artist.
But perhaps the more important realization was understanding that I had been one long before I was comfortable with the word.
Sometimes the identity arrives after the work.
Sometimes other people recognize it before we do.
And sometimes we have to create for a while before we finally stop apologizing for being the person who creates.
Sometimes the act of making is the point.
The Thing You Create Does Not Have to Explain the Wound
I also do not believe everything created during a painful period needs to look painful.
That idea is important to me.
You might be grieving and create the brightest thing you have ever made.
You might be lonely and paint a room full of people.
You might be struggling and design something exuberant.
You might create birds, gardens, stars, gold, flowers and fantastic landscapes.
The work does not have to document the wound literally.
Perhaps it is creating the place you wish you could inhabit for a while.
Perhaps the flowers are the medicine.
Perhaps all that color is there precisely because life has temporarily lost some of its own.
There is no rule that pain must produce dark art.
Sometimes pain produces extraordinarily beautiful things.
Healing Is Not the Same as Forgetting
Art cannot undo the past.
There are losses that cannot be replaced.
Relationships that cannot return to what they were.
Words that cannot be unsaid.
People we cannot bring back.
Opportunities that disappear.
Versions of ourselves we eventually have to release.
Healing does not require pretending none of that mattered.
Quite the opposite.
Sometimes healing begins when we finally admit how much it mattered.
And then we decide what we will carry forward.
Maybe art helps us make that decision.
We keep the love.
We keep the lesson.
We keep the memory.
We keep the part of ourselves that still wants to make something beautiful.
The rest can become lighter with time.
Perhaps This Is Why We Have Always Made Things
Human beings have been creating for as long as we have evidence of human beings.
We painted walls.
Carved figures.
Made jewelry.
Wove cloth.
Decorated ordinary objects.
Sang songs.
Told stories.
Danced.
Built beautiful places.
Left marks behind saying, in one form or another:
I was here.
I felt something.
This mattered to me.
There is something deeply human in the need to transform experience into form.
Perhaps we create partly because life is temporary.
Perhaps because memory is imperfect.
Perhaps because emotion needs somewhere to live outside the body.
Or perhaps there are simply moments when making something is how we remind ourselves that we are still here.
The Beautiful Things: Choosing beauty, meaning, and renewal from what remains
I do not want pain to be the most interesting thing about my life.
I do not want disappointment to be the author of the story.
I do not want the people who hurt me, the things I lost, or the moments that did not turn out the way I hoped to occupy more space than they deserve.
But I also do not need to pretend they never happened.
They are part of the material.
Not the whole piece.
Just part of it.
And perhaps that is what creating has taught me.
We cannot always choose what arrives in our lives.
But sometimes we can choose what we make from what remains.
A color.
A pattern.
A garden.
A garment.
A painting.
A song.
A new idea.
A new beginning.
Something that did not exist yesterday.
Something beautiful.
Sometimes the beautiful things are not created because life was beautiful.
They are created because something hurt, and we needed somewhere for that hurt to go.
And somehow, somewhere between the wound and the work, healing begins. I made a conscious effort to choose and to see beauty, meaning, and renewal from what remained after pain. It is important to not let pain or trauma or heartbreak define us or who we wish to become.
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