Art Dispels Anxiety

Anxiety is the highly volatile feeling we all try to avoid, but try as we might, what we resist tends to persist.

When everything feels like it’s falling apart, art provides us with a way to create meaning, hope and forward momentum.

Creating from impulse is the way we process emotions that can’t be put into words. Processing stuck and conflicting energy as we move the unspeakable into reality.

Holding angst and confusion in our system is like gripping a hot coal tightly. The process of art-iculation helps to release the tension into a medium that is outside of our mind, our body.

Once it’s out of our system we can reflect on it objectively. We can seperate ourselves, at least in part, from the feeling.

We’re told we need inspiration to channel into our creative practice, but we misunderstand what inspiration really is – from the old Latin, it means quite literally ‘to breathe into, with spirit or through spirit’.

What if to create art we simply draw on what is currently in the spirit of this moment?

Could it be that the inspiration we’ve been searching for has been with us the entire time?

What if anxiety is actually trapped inspiration wanting to be expressed in a physical medium?

Movement grounds energy. Touching pen to paper or brush to canvas is like setting free the static charge of electricity we inadvertently picked up through friction with life.

What if instead of waiting for inspiration to strike, we recognised anxiety as the fuel we’ve been waiting for all along?

Forget about the outcome. Obsessive focus on outcome is like holding your foot on the gas while you’re stuck in neutral.

Expression shifts you into gear. It completes the circuit and allows the creative current to flow and generates momentum.

Remember, it’s the practice that makes perfect, not the perfect that makes the practice.