(Hint – These paintings are not meant to impress you.)
Today I took out some paints, some paper and some little glass jars of water (which were originally mustard jars). I put on an oversized hawaiian shirt to protect my dress and sat under the sun. I squeezed some dense blobs of acryllic paint into my little plasticy palette and immediately dipped my brush without consciously choosing a colour or planning a pattern. My brush kissed the page without a second thought, and as if by magic life was brought onto the blank sheet. Colour. I swished my brush to and fro, I added water, I experimented with strokes. I had absolutely no intention whatsoever. I had no attachment to a finished product. No desire to be recognised as artistic, creative or talented. I just wanted to paint.
And you know what? I loved it. I felt true joy. I tried to remember the last time I painted. It’s been a while. You know why? Because for the past while I have deluded by the idea that everything we do needs to have a purpose. This American idea. Painting never really appeared as something important to do. And on the occassions it did, when I added it to my to-do list, I would never do it. That’s because I avoid doing tasks! I was so crazy I made things like painting and dancing and playing music tasks! Can you imagine?
The greatest lesson quarantine has taught me is to do away with this American idea. That life is only to be found in the future and the only decent way to ‘spend’ your time, is to work ceaselessly. I have become disconnected from the body, the people around me, the world, everything. (Thankfully not to a high degree. It’s not like I have a career or anything, lol.) But I had that mindset.
So while painting today, flowing with the brushstrokes, it became clear to me. This is what is meant by ‘expressing yourself.’ Again, another idea corrupted by the Americans. Expressing yourself is not about going anywhere. It’s not about building your talent, getting noticed or monetizing your work, although those things may happen too. Expressing yourself is not about mining yourself for ‘inner secrets’ that the world must know. Expressing yourself is not about trying to create something new or do something in a way that’s never been done before.
Here’s what I realised. Expressing yourself is merely… embodiment. It’s working with a medium, any medium, that gets you more involved in the world. An activity which puts you in a flow state, a state of deep-concentration, thoughtlessness, self-forgetting. Something which (not to be cliché) makes you feel alive, because you are more alive when you are engaged in such an activity. When you get out of your head and and you do something bodily, even something as simple as writing with an actual pen – then you are of the world, not merely in it.
So expression is about creating, for the sake of the creating process and not for the end result. Let go of attachment to the final product. If you paint a picture or dance a dance for something which comes at the end, then you have been doing a task, not art, and the final product will not look anything at all like art. Just do it for how it feels to do it. Expression is about moving for the sake of moving. Drawing, for that lovely sight of colour appearing on paper. Making tea, for that lovely smell when you hold the warm mug up to your face. Riding a pony for the lovely connection you get to the animal and the rhythmic feeling of the trot-trot. Expressing yourself is a way of bringing yourself deeper to reality. Reality, which is right there, all the time. Yet which is so easily to take for granted because of how much time we spend thinking, day-dreaming, absorbed in instant messaging or web-browsing or reluctantly doing tasks as part of our job and household.
Express yourself – and come home.
This is what I have learned about self expression. Right about here is the point where I would normally make some intention or promise to commit to doing something new. Or I might ask you to think about doing something new. But I’m not going to do that. I have (mostly) done away with that task-oriented mindset. The mindset which focuses on plans and abstractions, the mindset which disconnects.
The mindset I frequently find myself in these days is the opposite. It is the mindset of spontaneity, beingness, going with the flow. Right now I have the privelege to be able to live much of my day in this mindset, and I have to remind myself to be grateful.
PS – Here is a not so Tao painting I did of my sister!
Hannah Fitzpatrick Creative 