The shape of feelings

I recently read a paper by Gernod Bohme 'Atmosphere as a Fundamental Concept of a New Aesthetics', Thesis Eleven, 36, 1993, p. 113-126. (German: 'Atmosphäre' Essays zur Neuen Ästhetik, Frankfurt/M, Suhrkamp, extended edition 2013.) and his ideas about the sensibility of space. He suggests that it has atmosphere, an aura, something vague (and often dismissed as a tangible formal aspect in art work) but still very much there. He suggests that things have an atmosphere before you arrive, and that we have a sense of it with our whole body. This rang true for me, and the knowledge I have of things, their inside outside qualities and the interactions that occur. Bohm quoted Hermann Schmitz another philospher who acknowledges the aura of things. I checked him out and a bottom line for him is that feelings are things or half things, making them something that can be talked about. He goes on to say that we may think our feelings are private, but they are shared, perhaps by physically observed giveaways, and the fact is humans have emotions and feel their effects, from others as well as themselves. Schmitz asserts that feelings are what motivate us, and in my experience I easily concur. Acknowledging feelings, and accepting them as ones own lived experience supports ones mental well being. Identifying the lived experience and the feelings with it (experiencing and living are synonymous and require feeling)as ones own makes them things. They are things one can dwell in, returning to what might be called memories. However though a memory and feeling 'thing' have crossovers, but they are not the same. The feeling thing may evoke emotions but it is not a particular emotion. I am starting to investgate these areas futher using words. As I gather up the various things(subjects) that fall into my paintings I keep returning to finding the mood of the piece as my dterminer of what can stay, and if the mood is not there I am lost. It is not something easy to articulate and I circle around understanding the sense of a place to make a start. Even that is not a sure thing. I am trying to discern something by feeling the exchange between spaces, and of the spaces within things that are also in exchange. From the exchange there is a shape of the feeling that is almost independent of the parts; an over arching shape. This is the true subject of the painting. The theories of Bohm and Schmitz support some of the knowledge I access through my creative methods, but they do not explain it. The painting below was originally a big pink ear hovering over a road through a narrow forested valley. It was not working. I added cut out pieces of plywood. Eventually the painting came to be the elusive quality of a relationship occurring in a particular time and place.

In the living room, oil on panel and plywood, 24''x24'', 2012

Psychic shelter

What is psychic shelter? It is a place where I do not have to make a decision if I don't want to. It's a place of possibilities, and though there is no immediate pressure to go one way or another, there is the sense that something will happen. It's not a predictable outcome but it's quite acceptable, and in the meantime I can stay here to feel the mechanics of the parts at work. I can approach the space at a speed that matches the unfolding of the scene as I take in the parts. I am not in danger, I am not bored, and I do not have the answers. I am part of the picture, giving witness to something I am not otherwise privy to. This comforts me. One of the first paintings I made that I can positively call psychic shelter, was on a small piece of flooring, and was of a rectangular building, with a low pitched roof, and a single open door. The building sat on a slightly raised platform in the centre ground fairly far away, on an open plain with a range of mountains in the distance. Colours were overall warm. I called it 'Giving My Father Shelter'. My dad, a foster child, teen soldier in WW2, and immigrant to Canada could be gruff and given to stony silences, deeply puzzling me. I loved him. Since that painting I have painted structures, and scenes to house, or hold feelings that are perhaps uncomfortable, close by, familiar and unknown to me, yet there. In this way a space is given to some vague thing, and there is recognition, which is a relief. There are other indiscernible things in the back ground keeping peace. I wonder if what might arise in feelings can cancel eachother out. Having an image come to me, always of a space for something to be, presents a chance to discover and hopefully redeem. The image comes with a feeling, though maybe its the other way around, the feeling has an image? The act of painting itself, the rhythmic movement, the subtle blending of colours, emerging shapes, give form to that first image, but its not right if the feeling is not there. The feeling/image holds all the things that are not here, things that I miss. Grieve. More psychic shelter for the love left behind for what has been lost. In therapy the first thing the therapist must establish with the client is a safe space, in order to build trust, as without trust there can be no therapy. In art therapy, the object of creativity (with therapist there maintaining the boundaries, and grounding the client) is the safe space. The creative process is where feelings are allowed and not judged. What the process does and objects made in art therapy is offer psychic shelter for the pain that is being released.