Depression Squared: Drawing Board

I have not created a picture since around the age of 12, and the end of compulsory school Art Classes. When I did produce Art it was so third rate that even my parents didn’t care to keep it. So Art Therapy was not a natural choice for me.

But the casual chaos of an Art Room seems an integral part of every therapeutic setting. Even if it is only the lack of alternative spaces, it draws you in. The splodges of others’ less than perfect experiences are visible. You are invited to play within the loosest of boundaries, in a way which sets the spirit free.

Time and again, I have found myself sitting with some combination of a poem, a book, a string, a leaf, a pile of magazines, a blank sheet of paper, paints, pastels, other colours, and a request to turn whatever thoughts may cross my mind in that forty minutes into images. Despite the most innocuously gentle mood music, it has often felt like stripping naked in a crowded room to transfer some of what was in my head on to the page in front of me in concrete form.

To start with I tried hard not to think too much, and to relax enough simply to let my hands move. Slowly, over time, I learned how to let colours and shapes reflect the slightest of ideas or the shadow of a mood.

This is not a fairytale: I didn’t discover a buried talent for drawing, and come out a Grand Master. In fact, quite the opposite: Through seeing what others could produce in the same circumstances I became acutely aware of the limits of my talents. But I did start, or restart, a way to translate the world into pictures, and in doing so, a way to command and control it even for the briefest of times.

A strange and rare peace came from Art. Time seemed to stand still in the many different variations of Art Groups I attended. I learned to release my inner child to do the best she could, soothed by a total lack of pressure to perform.

Obviously there were people with real skill, who always seemed to sit across from me where I could watch them transform the paper into something truly extraordinary. Compared to them my efforts were crude, uncouth. When called on to explain them, I could only feel embarrassed about the gap between what I’d have liked to offer up and what I actually delivered.

Having participated in it, I still do not find it easy to understand how Art Therapy for non-artists works. There is something about being forced into a situation in which you have to unearth your insides without words which is oddly soothing. It takes you back to the kindergarten painting table and using the gentlest of stimuli allows you to produce something that at least in the moment can seem meaningful.

It feels wrong to put work whose creation was so carefully nurtured straight into the bin. So instead, the piece of so-called Art is taken to adorn the bare regulation-issue bedside tables, placing a stamp of individuality in the bland vanilla space. It stays there for a week or two as a testament to a softer hour spent in its creation, a memory of an island of relaxed time in largely stormy seas.

Then, inevitably, a tougher time rolls around the corner. The carefully combined colours become too bright, their associations too serene. Those same pictures are swept from pride of place. They are scrunched up and tossed in the bin, to be cleared with the rest of the garbage, where they seem to belong.