Art as Manifestation
- yellowtopaz23
- Apr 18
- 2 min read
I am an artist and writer living with schizoaffective disorder. Art helps me create a new reality, and it helps me heal when life gets too overwhelming. When I make art it makes me feel happy. I always feel like sharing it immediately with society. I hope it makes other people feel good too to look at what I made. I could look at art all day. It is my reason for living.
I normally don't imagine a complete picture in advance. I allow the images to reveal themselves to me. I might paint for an hour or two at a glance, but it feels like it only took a few minutes. Something about the absorption with the materials and the process of making images is so pleasing to me that it speeds up time.
It's almost like time spent in a dream. In a dream the time spent could be days or lightyears, and you could travel all over exploring the world, but the physical time spent dreaming only takes a few minutes. It's mysterious. When I paint, I ask for the spirit of the divine to make it good. The power to change time, to change feeling, to transform the energy of something negative into something useful describes the creative process of sublimation. You can tell a lot about a person with the pictures they make.
The themes in my artwork are about ameliorating negativity. I explore this through images of fairies, eclipses, unicorns, and waterfalls. The symbolism that makes itself visible is like trying to decipher a dream. The image teaches me something I didn't realize about myself. Art making helps me to ground my flights of fancy into a physical object that creates a new reality.
It's always helpful in a clinical setting to be able to draw. I did a series of self portraits once when I was hospitalized. Even though I was looking in a mirror as I drew, the images all came out very different. They represented different parts of me. Sometimes the hair seemed to tie my head on to my neck, kind of like an anchor. In another drawing, the patterns on my shirt become like an EKG. In another one all my features became delineated by tears, and by the time I was ready to be released, the portrait looked more realistic and I knew I was ready to be free.
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