Synesthesia: yearning
A quick photoshop manipulation. I wish I had paints and canvas.
Emotional painting
When I had depression, I had a constant feeling of swimming blindly in a black liquid, as thick as cotton.
Since I experience synesthetic feelings, every emotion on this black and thick background had shape, colour, size, texture and opacity.
When I tried to paint this, I synthesized all shapes to basic figures, squares and rectangles mostly, but the rest of the features stayed as I had seen them in my head. First I would start a composition. My subconsciousness was looking for some kind of symmetry and order, so after a while the whole composition would change into a set of squares.
I would paint with emotions, with my brain only controlling technical stuff, and without a major involvment of my will. Sometimes I would spend half a year on one picture because the colour or the texture weren’t right. The effect was never exactly as I’d anticipate it. It was the only way I could express emotions, and nobody knew this until now (I told a friend).
And when most people see my paintings, they usually say that they’d paint something like this in half an hour and it’s not real art because it doesn’t show people or objects.
I stopped painting a few years ago, because the feedback I was getting was depressing. I’d like to start again, I think.
My body
For the first time in the last few years I’d like to perform some major artistic activity, and for the first time in those years I don’t have any means to (because of my current situation and place of residence; long story). I have an idea for a series of emotive self-portraits, both photography and painting, that I couldn’t probably show to anyone afterwards anyway, because they’d be nudes, and too emotive, and I don’t like being physically and emotionally naked before others.
But I seriously think this might be the only way to get rid of my demons, or tame them at least. Or maybe make friends with them, as my brother has recently suggested. To turn them into images, so they’re defined, restrained and changed into something good. To stop quelling my emotions inside and vent them into something constructive and beautiful. To like my body as it is. Yeah, I’d love to like my body.
