Making Meaning from Mystery

Process painting can be a wonderful way to tap into your subconscious mind but sometimes what shows up on the paper just doesn’t make sense. Of course, not all painting need to make sense. Maybe you just like the motion of the brush in your hand or you are exploring the way the colors look on the paper. In that case, just embrace the experience, everything is fine.

But, sometime, you can sense that the painting is tapping into your deeper consciousness and you don’t understand what it is telling you. When this happens, the first thing to do is to ignore the urge to understand until the painting is done. At this moment, the act of painting is allowing the intuitive, creative, nonverbal part of yourself to use line, color and image to send a message to the world. Trying to make sense of it shifts you into a logical mode that disrupts your creative process. There is plenty of time to be logical after you are done painting. Allowing yourself to stay in confusion allows you to stay in connection with your deeper self. 

However, once done, you can integrate the experience more fully by inviting the logical side of your brain making sense of what happened in its own, left-brain terms. When you sense that there is more meaning in a painting, here are some questions you can use to help your verbal, logical part of the brain figure out what happened. 

 You can try this out on my painting of the spider web. Next month, I’ll post my own responses

Questions to Uncover Meaning in Your Painting

-  Stand back and look at the picture as whole. What do you notice? How does it make you feel?
-  For each of the objects in the painting (for example, the web is one object, the background colors are another)

• What is the mood or feeling associated with object?
  
• What is the relationship between that object and the others?
  
• If it could talk, what would it say?
  
• What are the common cultural associations for that object?
  
• What are your associations with that object?
  
• What aspects of the object seemed important when you painted it?
  
• What aspects stand out for you now that you look at it? Color? Size? Symmetry? Placement on the paper?
  
• Do you see an connection between this object and someone or something in your own life

-  What isn’t in the painting? Is there something hidden, missing or implied?
-  If the painting were put into motion, what would happen next?
-       The painting was is a expression of painter in that moment. What do you think it says?

As you work these questions, keep checking in with your intuition. Some questions will seem important and other irrelevant. Some answers will seem to fit, even they don’t quite make sense while others just don’t resonate. Trying to understand a painting as a message from your subconscious is very individual process. To get it right, you need to consider not just the final painting but also your own experience, first, as you painted it and, now as you look at it.

Sometimes, as you explore these questions, the meaning becomes very clear. Other times, even if you have a strong sense that the picture is trying to tell you something, the mystery of your painting stays a mystery. Rene Magritte wrote, “My painting is visible images which conceal nothing…they evoke mystery and indeed, when one sees one of my pictures, one asks oneself this simple question, ‘What does that mean?’ It does not mean anything, because mystery mean nothing either, it is unknowable.”