Home » Visual & Performing Arts » Oil Painting » Using Metaphors to Cope

Using Metaphors to Cope

© Susan A. Wenz-Denise

Expressing strong and confusing emotions through art can be a daunting task if they are difficult to deal with. Strong images and literal translations of traumatic experiences are not easy for an artist to portray on an emotional level. Working in such a literal expression also does not always help the artist in a therapeutic way, but can sometimes compound the effects a tragedy can have on an artist and those viewing their artwork. This can be seen in the repetitive images of mass destruction and grief that have been flooding the radio and television after last Tuesday’s terrorist attacks that stunned the United States.

After a week of being faced with the literal horror around me and still hearing myself and others say “I still just can’t believe this has happened”, I can easily see how the brutal truth does not always necessarily make it easier to comprehend. In this time that every American’s heart has been broken, it seems to me that now more than ever metaphors can promote clarity and an open thought process for all artists needing to express their reactions.

Oil painting has always been my own strategy in understanding my Self and the situations surrounding me throughout my life. I have never found it easy to paint in a literal way, depicting things by spelling out exactly how they feel to me, simply because emotions are an enigma to me when there are so many and so intense. Feelings of anger, sadness, vulnerability, betrayal, grief, fear, and loss are rampant throughout Americans right now. When so many intense emotions collide, it is a very difficult task to sort them out, and creativity's enemy otherwise known as "artist's block" becomes a risk to artists.

I have a way to tap into and use metaphors or symbolism in my paintings in order to cope with my Self, especially in times of traumatic stress. I find that if I pick symbols through brainstorming, trust my insticts and paint them, then my paintings explain to me over time how to cope with my emotions. In other words, they begin to form a communication from my subconcious to my concious to help me translate my emotions.

For example, when I was 25 years old I found myself feeling very much trapped in existence between a transition of childhood and adulthood. There were so many emotions new to me as I moved from being an individual dependent upon my parents with more future ahead of me than past, to an independent women with 25 years of history already left behind. I felt overwhelmed and unable to cope with the reality of my existence in a direct way because the feelings were so abstract. In order to help myself understand better, I turned to painting and I found myself focusing on images of teacups, coffee servers, old photographs of my grandmother and other nostalgia. I also became interested in scientific concepts of time theory, and began including images that represent past, present and future in my paintings. I let myself display all images that ran through my mind haphazardly, and they eventually became metaphors into the emotions I was feeling at the time. I was able to step back and let my paintings tell me exactly how I felt through abstract, metaphorical imagery. Although the paintings were not literal, my subconcious and concious minds had come together in my paintings and I clearly understood my own expression.

The copyright of the article Using Metaphors to Cope in Oil Painting is owned by . Permission to republish Using Metaphors to Cope in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.