My First Intuitive Painting

When my daughter was a baby, I attended a week-long expressive painting retreat on a remote island on the West Coast of Canada that taught me a great deal about creative vulnerability. When I arrived, I felt heavily guarded and full of tumultuous emotions. 

At the painting retreat, we were encouraged to paint anything that intuitively wanted to be expressed. Many of us painted graphic and embarrassing images. Nervous, I kept watching the instructor for reactions of shock, rejection or dismay, yet his face remained accepting when I painted subject matter that felt shameful to me.

I was uncomfortable with meeting the more disowned parts of myself through painting, yet at the same time, I felt so alive. I wanted to sustain the intimacy I was gaining with my most rejected parts of self. In this way, the spontaneous creative process can feel like falling in love with yourself.

Vulnerability is an intensely open-hearted stance toward life. In safe environments, openness is a desirable state of mind. As you learn how to withstand the flood of your difficult emotions, you will begin to unblock the holding patterns of pain that have been perpetuating for years. Opening to unwanted emotions and hidden strengths and gifts will soften your body and your heart. 

My First Intuitive Painting

“When you think your life is falling apart, it's usually falling together in disguise.”
~  Charlotte Eriksson

The painting you see above was painted over thirty years ago. This was my first intuitive painting. As a high-end gallery artist at the time, I was unsure how to interpret the intuitive imagery, but something told me that what I had painted was very true.

Disempowered and dependent at the time, I had very little agency or voice in my relationships. Comfortable, yet restlessly unsatisfied in my bland and unexpressive existence, my life, based on the lies of social appearances, fell completely apart a few months later. And, as my old life fell apart, my new life as a more honest and creatively powerful woman began to emerge.