Artistic Visions and Clear Thoughts

The arts can be an amazing therapeutic tool for those of us living with chronic illness and/or permanent disability.  The arts such as music, drawing, painting, sketching, crafts can provide a much needed pathway for expression when even the simplest of everyday tasks seem overwhelmingly daunting.

For the most part, my health has been quite lousy for the past few months.  This sort of health affects every aspect of my everyday life, and unfortunately, this is especially true when it comes to my ability to express my creative, artistic side.  Expressing myself in art is difficult when my thoughts, as well as my emotions, tend to be shrouded in darkness.

I have struggled with this sort of thing my entire life.  For many, performing music or being creative in art lightens moods, entices relaxation and rejuvenates one's soul.  On the other hand, there are those people such as myself who just cannot find a single creative nor artistic fiber in my being when I am not completely relaxed and at peace first.  For me, I must be relaxed and focused first, then comes the creativity and expression.

Truth be told, I haven't touched a piano in well over a year.  There are a few reasons for this but the primary reason is frustration.  My health has been causing so much frustration that it has been overpowering my creative side.  Compounding this emotional frustration are physical symptoms such as tremors, coordination problems particularly with fine motor skills, vision difficulties, pain and cognitive difficulties including an inability to focus on any task for longer than a couple of minutes.  Sitting at the piano or trying to express myself artistically in any medium when I am experiencing and struggling with these symptoms only causes more and more frustration.

When I try to push on through these struggles and force myself to express myself creatively and artistically I end up only compounding and worsening my initial frustrations. This affects my ability to play the piano...  it affects my ability to pick up a camera and shoot photography...  it affects my ability to draw...  it even affects my ability to even envision and plan home renovations.

For me, my artistic side only seems to emerge when I am feeling well...  when I am feeling relaxed already...  when I am gaining energy again after a long bout of poor health.

I awoke this morning feeling pretty good.  I had thoughts of engineering and interior home design for our home renovations which seem to be on hold far more often and for longer than I would like.  And, what is really odd is I awoke with a very clear vision bouncing around inside my head of the very distinctive architecture of the Walt Disney Concert Hall.

Not only was I able to see the beautiful sweeping lines of this unique work of art, but I could actually feel the sweeping lines curving cartoonishly in perspective while reaching skyward.  I could feel the texture of the steel panels.  I could see the glow of sun in these steel panels and I could feel the warmth radiating off the structure.  I was envisioning Disney animators sketching storyboards of a cartoonish concert hall for the next Disney animation.   This was the time, finally, for me to express some of my artistic visions...

Today was a good day.  My thoughts were clearer than they have been in months.  I probably could have sat at the piano all day long today.  Actually, if I was alone in the house without anyone to be disturbed by my music, I would probably be sitting at the piano in the dark through the night tonight.  I feel like I have artistic emotions and ideas lined up in my head waiting to be expressed in appropriate mediums like airplanes circling in the sky, orderly but anxiously in a holding pattern in the clouds awaiting their clearance to emerge into clear skies and obtain their clearance to the appropriate runway for landing.

This sketch/rendering is still not completely finished but it was really nice to be able to effectively express myself today.  It was such a productive day, artistically, that I felt the need to write about it here and share my vision from this morning!

Let's hope for more days like today...