The canvas of life

 

Every person is born as a clean canvas. Someone is more lucky, someone less, but sooner or later everyone raises the question: “Why me? How to figure it out?” Of course, history tells us an easy way – do what your ancestors did, and you don’t have to think, and you don’t have to choose. There is more time to become a master, to master perfectly what is destined for the family. And if you play with the metaphor completely freely, you can immediately understand who should become what canvas of life.

Here is a woman who chose to serve the family. All her thoughts are about how to feed her kids and her husband, and she is like a festive tablecloth that is covered with wonderful dishes for satiety and joy. But every day there are more and more stains on her from past dinners, which are not washed off, and her appearance is more and more festive and ordinary. And very soon this tablecloth will simply be sent to rags. And in real life, we can often see this: a woman who gave herself to the service of the family in full, forgetting about herself, at one moment becomes useless to anyone.

Everyone voluntarily or involuntarily becomes a part of a large canvas of life. Someone chooses himself as a comforting handkerchief, wiping other people’s tears all his life, or becomes a blanket for seriously ill patients, a canvas for the fantasies of a great couturier, or maybe a rag for scrap. But I want to talk about an artist, a creator who paints on the canvas of life himself.

Is it easy? I think no…
Is it bold? I think yes.

One has been polishing his skills in sketches for a long time and with high quality for years and draws correctly and decently. Everyone says that he draws well, he is a pro in his field, he is a wonderful craftsman.

Such an artist will easily convey everything he saw, and will be able to recreate every grain of reality in detail. He is a master, but looking at the picture, we admire the reality and, of course, the skill. And there are other artists that art therapy creates.

They do not draw the real – they draw their own. The world into which it is impossible to look and which is often real only in the head of the creator. And then you conditionally freeze in thoughts. What is this? And, looking at the image, your imagination draws whole worlds, already forming your possible versions of reality. This is creativity.

Why am I writing this: art therapy is the creation of your own gallery of the inner world. When something obscure and sometimes even frightening becomes visible and tangible. As if everyone gets the opportunity to change the already existing canvas of life and turn it into a canvas for their own masterpiece – “My Life”.

Choosing the space and time for creation, adding incomprehensible parts into the overall composition of harmony, choosing the palette of colors and the texture of their overlay on our own life, we seem to be creating a new history of ourselves. And the experience that art therapy gives, very imperceptibly provides the soul with the strength to create masterpieces in life situations, when the choice is limited, and vice versa, when there are so many opportunities that one can get confused and chickened out.
Well, then it’s a matter of technology: to find a decent frame and a place where your picture will be accepted as special, and not thrown into the fire, like trash, which takes up space in someone else’s space.

This is what makes art therapy possible, creating a unique experience of self-creation.

Victoria Nazarevich 2020 ©