Stop harshing my vibe!

"I'm tired of all this emotion! I just want to paint!"

This lament, or one like it, has been heard many times over the first few days of my free Find Your Joy taster course.

Let me back up a little ... every year when we run this free course, we open up a Facebook group for the students. Many choose not to join the group, but a lot do - this year there are almost 20,000 people in there.

My students are lovely, but any time you get 20,000 people in the same place, you get a little friction. One of the most common causes of friction in art groups is the clash between people who connect with their emotions and express them openly, and people who do not.

I find this fascinating, as for me, art is all about feeling. What are we painting if we're not painting about, or from, emotion?  So it doesn't surprise me that my class brings up strong emotions in people - in fact I expect and welcome it. I take it as a sign that people are doing the work and making progress.

But I'm also aware that throughout history, there have always been artists for whom emotion plays little or no part in their work. Agnes Martin for example, was driven by an ideal of beauty. The New Objectivists (Otto Dix, George Grosz, and Max Beckmann) sought an unsentimental and objective approach to art-making. Their work was a direct reaction against expressionism. And Edward Hopper always stressed that his primary interest was in studying light, not in making emotional paintings.

And quite apart from the ideas that lie behind different types of art, there are also the personal issues. Some artists have very carefully and deliberately sealed themselves off from emotional expression. Perhaps this was ingrained during childhood, or happened as a reaction to a traumatic event. Or perhaps they are currently experiencing personal difficulties and can't handle other peoples' emotional outbursts on top of their own struggles.

For these people, my Facebook group can be a real challenge. Suddenly they are faced with the very thing they have worked hard to avoid. Emotions are messy, unpredictable, often irrational. This makes them frightening to some of us. We'd rather keep everything buttoned up so we can feel safe. 

This fear is what prompts people to get snappy or judgmental. To say things like "it's just an art course, why all the whining?" or "I don't know why you had to share all that personal stuff with the whole group" or "pull yourself together! It's just paint!"

Personally, I think there is no right or wrong when it comes to the role emotion plays in your work, in your process, or in your response to art works.

I think it's OK if you prefer to keep your emotions out of art altogether and I also think it's OK if you cry every time you paint. 

I think it's OK if you only want to talk about paint techniques and I also think it's OK if you want to share the deep emotions you feel when you use the colour red.

If art is about personal expression, then don't we have to let people be exactly who they are? Even if we don't understand it?

I'm sharing this because it brought me a little realisation this week ... by observing our own reactions to this, we can learn something about our own artistic voice. If you're made extremely uncomfortable by other peoples' emotional outbursts, there are two routes you can go. You can choose to stretch yourself and try to take in their emotions a little. (This might change your art in interesting ways). Or you can simply recognise that emotion is not an important part of your artistic path, and then you can hone in on what is.

Likewise, if you find your art-making is bringing up unpleasant emotions, can you choose to really feel them, rather than pushing them down or getting angry about it? Emotions have a funny way of passing if we just let them be. And is there a way to bring more of that emotion into your work? (There may not be, but it's worth asking the question - often painting a feeling can help you process it).

There really is no way to get this wrong. Art is a constant journey of self-discovery. It's quite magical, really :)