What is art about if it isn't about emotion? The other night, I told my daughter Noble when she was feeling desperate because she couldn't think of anything to draw, simply to draw how she felt. Her results were compellingly real. Not realistic in a photographic sense, but real in their powerful emotional content.
Some of us are buffeted by wild swings of mood. In a doctors' offices last week, I looked closely at some Van Gogh reproductions from his late career that hung framed on the walls, and felt the pain and rage boiling through the glass that covered them, and wondered how he felt, what he endured, and how painting was a vehicle, perhaps the only effective one, by which he was able to find release from his terrible emotional isolation without harming himself.
Medications work for some people with mood disorders. For others, either distrust or bad experience rule them out. For some of us, colors on paper or canvas seem, at times, all that there is between the unbearable and the abyss.
Talberts and Rads with GLP Lagonda, 8 1/4 x 11 9/16, Derwent watercolor pencils
Scott A. Stultz
