Make Art Not War

A Series: Learning to Love the Mess

I am noticing something about myself.

Without trying, I gravitate toward blues and greens—the warmer blues, the softer greens, colors that somehow feel like they are breathing.

Again and again, I find myself returning to circles and lines. Mostly black lines.

Then I color inside them.

Yes…I color in the lines.

There is something in me that wants order, balance, harmony. I want every color to have its place. I want the painting to breathe without becoming chaotic.

Apparently, somewhere in my brain lives a very diligent crossing guard.

“Stay between the lines, everyone.”

I laugh because painting is teaching me things that decades of psychotherapy somehow overlooked.

I have a surprisingly difficult time making a mess.

Many of my online teachers encourage looseness.

“Get messy.”

“Trust the process.”

Easy for them to say.

Meanwhile, my executive functioning has apparently enrolled in art school.

The control center of my brain wants circles to close properly. It wants lines to behave. It wants every color to know exactly where it belongs.

Who knew abstract art could become a meditation on personality?

The canvas doesn’t lie.

It quietly reveals the habits we carry through the rest of our lives.

Yesterday my painter friend Lonnie gently suggested, “Try hot pink.”

Hot pink?

That wasn’t in my carefully organized internal color palette.

But I reached for it anyway.

And there it was—laughing with the blues and greens as if they had been waiting for one another all along.

I even found myself adding a few wandering dots, traveling across the canvas with no destination at all. Just little pilgrims on their way to somewhere…or perhaps nowhere. For once, they didn’t need a map. Neither did I.

Today I have another adventure planned.

Messiness.

Not because messy is better than neat.

Not because freedom has to look chaotic.

But because I want to meet the part of myself that becomes nervous when things don’t go according to plan.

Perhaps today I’ll make an ugly mark and refuse to rescue it.

Perhaps I’ll let one color wander into another without apologizing.

Perhaps beauty doesn’t always ask permission before it arrives.

One of the surprises of this journey has been Kandinsky.

For years I admired him from a distance without really feeling drawn to his work.

Then someone laughed and said my paintings reminded them of his.

“Hahahaha,” I thought.

Surely not.

But then I looked again.

Really looked.

Now I see something I had missed.

His paintings dance between structure and freedom.

Some are lyrical.

Some are wild.

Some are almost musical.

And yes…

Some are wonderfully, gloriously messy.

I find myself imagining not only the artist but the human being.

Was he wrestling with the same impulses?

Did he begin with order and slowly learn to trust disorder?

Did he discover that chaos and harmony are not enemies but dance partners?

I don’t know.

But I do know this.

Every morning our dining room table looks less like a table and more like Thanksgiving.

Not Thanksgiving with turkey and stuffing.

Thanksgiving with abundance.

Brushes of every size.

Scrapers.

Markers.

Oil sticks.

Canvases leaning against chairs.

Papers waiting patiently.

Bottles and tubes of paint in every imaginable color.

Yesterday I discovered a new salmon color that is so heartbreakingly beautiful I wanted to thank whoever first imagined it into existence.

How extraordinary that a single color can lift the heart.

Around this table we paint.

But we are doing something else, too.

We tell stories.

Real stories.

Stories about families and grief, marriages and divorces, children, dreams, heartbreak, healing, aging, psychedelics, hope, and the strange miracle of still being here.

The paintings become richer.

So do we.

The deeper the conversation, the deeper the color.

Last night my dear friend Michelle arrived to join us.

One more artist.

One more life.

One more heart at the table.

There is always room for one more.

That may be the greatest lesson this week has offered me.

Art is rarely a solitary act.

Even when we paint in silence, we borrow courage from one another.

Someone reaches for hot pink.

Someone else splatters paint with wild abandon.

Someone carefully paints inside the lines.

Someone makes circles.

Someone makes squares.

Someone leaves glorious accidents untouched.

And little by little, without anyone announcing it, we each become just a little more ourselves.

Every painting is quietly painting the painter.

Every brushstroke is introducing us to ourselves.

Perhaps making art—not war—begins exactly there.

Around a table overflowing with outrageous abundance.

With friends who encourage hot pink.

With wandering dots that trust the journey.

With stories that deepen the colors of our lives.

And with the quiet courage to make one unexpected mark that changes everything.