Intuitive Painting and the Wild Ride of Risk and Change

The painting has no consequence in your life. Your job or your status or your marriage or health or family relationships are not at stake when you paint. It’s just a piece of paper after all. And if you can’t take the risk of ruining a twenty five cent piece of paper with some cheap kids paint, what’s the likelihood that you will take risks in some of those other arenas? But I think that is the point. Some part of the psyche fully understands that if you start taking risks anywhere in your life then the movement that accompanies change could all too easily spill over into arenas that do matter. So there is a built in mechanism to stop this process before it can really get going and you’ve sold the house and are working as a bush pilot in Alaska!

The truth of it is, anytime I have seen someone go against that voice in their head, and take the risk of doing what they think will ruin a painting, they always end up happy. For example, a woman in one of my classes was painting an abstract painting full of airy, pastel colors. She was engaged for a while, but then started to lose some steam. As she contemplated where the energy might be next leading her she got the impulse to bring black into the swirling pinks and blues and yellows. And she stopped. Dead. I was standing next to her and encouraging her to go ahead with what she was being given and to take the risk of trusting in her intuition once again. She was full of arguments. “This doesn’t make any sense. I don’t really need for the black to be here. It will most certainly ruin my painting. Maybe I can bring it into the next painting. Why does it have to be here?” She spent a few minutes in this losing battle of bargaining with the intuitive painting gods. She was balking because she was caught on the hook of really liking her painting. She was kind of in love with all these bright, soft colors and now the black was wanting to come in and change everything. It was touch and go there for a while. The resistance had her pretty firmly in it’s grip. But she eventually did it. Courage and curiosity won out over fear and the need for things to stay the same. She started painting the black and when I came back to check on her a few minutes later she was engrossed and engaged, fascinated by the black and how it was transforming her painting. At that moment, she didn’t care about whether or not she was ruining it. She was simply painting. She was engaged with the flow of her own creative energy, and that was all she needed.

Listening to and believing the voice of fear around the prospect of ruination always results in paralysis.