Ep 08: There are No Bad Emotions
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Perfectionist in Recovery
There are No Bad Emotions
Hello every one and welcome back to the Perfectionist in Recovery Podcast! My name is Marcy Parks and I am a Perfectionist in Recovery.
I am excited to chat more with you today about my upcoming collection, “There are no Bad Emotions”, but first, I wanted to say Thank you for listening if you are listening! I am so grateful for the feedback that I continue to receive about the podcast. As I have shared previously, your feedback helps make this podcast more enjoyable for you to listen to, so if you have feedback to share, please do! Send me a message at Marcy Parks Art on Instagram, or go to my website at www.MarcyParksArt.com and fill out the contact form there to let me know what you think of the podcast! Otherwise, if you are enjoying the podcast, please subscribe, follow, leave a review on whatever streaming platform you are using.
Alright, so let’s get into it!
So today I wanted to share a little bit more about my upcoming collection, “There are No Bad Emotions” coming on September 5th and share more about the process and insights that I am coming away from this work with.
In my last episode, I shared about how you can do a similar exercise at home. Today I want to talk a little bit more about what this process and experience has been like for me in hopes that if you listened to last week’s episode and have decided to try this out at home for yourself, that me sharing more about my process and my experience can help inspire you more.
Just like I shared last week, each painting starts with an emotion. This may be an emotion I have a history of struggling with, it might be one I have recently been overwhelmed by, or it might just be one that is poignant for me in the moment. When I start to recall the experience of that emotion or allow myself to experience that emotion, I almost immediately have a color association that comes to mind. It is with this color that I begin.
Typically, that initial color that I chose becomes the dominant color for the painting. I almost think of it as like the ambient color, or ambient emotion - it sets the mood for the whole painting. If you look at my instagram and the paintings I have shared thus far, the main color for each emotion is typically used for the background of the painting and it helps to inform the rest of the colors chosen.
From this place, I will do some journaling and explore the feeling and the qualities it brings with a little more intention. Does it feel sharp? Does it feel sticky? Is it thick and heavy or is it fast moving and mobile? Does it have teeth or is it more defensive? And so on. As I write down those qualities, I am also making color and mark associations with those words as I go. For example, when I think of sharp, I am thinking of brush strokes and marks that are quick, explosive, energetic, and have edges, or I might even make marks through patches of color or brush strokes using the opposite end of a paintbrush or one of my catalyst wedge tools that I have - essentially trying to mimic scratches through paint. When I think of something being sticky, I picture it as drippy and kind of murky in appearance, like if you were to look through honey.
This is also the time when I get the first impression of other emotions that are tangled up in the primary emotion I am choosing to explore. For example, I just recently finished painting through my resentment and in my exploration I found feelings of anger, sadness, and even tenderness. If those other feelings make themselves known as I am writing, I make color associations with those as well and write those colors down.
This step alone can be very therapeutic and can feel like a big release because you are still taking the time to honestly see, to witness, your emotions. If painting is not your thing, this alone is a good exercise to try out and practice. Otherwise, knowing that I am going to be moving on to painting next, I try not to spend too much time here - I try to write quickly and instinctively and not give myself too much time to second guess anything.
Next, I start assembling my color palette. I will say that it is nice to have some understanding of color theory for this step, but that’s absolutely not necessary. After all, these are YOUR feelings, not anyone else’s, so that alone means you get to make the rules and nothing else matters. It is, however, nice to have tangible things to look at and touch when assembling your colors! This could mean you just go to your local art supply store or craft store (with a mask, obviously) and pick out tubes of paint for your colors, or go to the local hardware store and pick out paint color swatches from the paint section. An even more accessible option that is also COVID social distancing approved (AND a great artist activity to get inspired and give your mind space to be creative) is to go for a walk and take photos of colors outside and around that inspire you!
I would say Pinterest is also a great place to get inspiration - you can type in the search bar your main color and the words “color palette” next to it and the feed will populate all sorts of pre-assembled color palettes for you to get inspired by. However, I wouldn’t necessarily recommend it for this exercise because, as I said before, when it comes to expressing your emotions, this is your experience and you get to make the rules. That means, carefully curated pinterest palettes may not fully capture or express the complexity of your experience.
I, personally, love embroidery thread for my inspiration. I talked about this in a recent instagram post. I don’t really know why, or how, or when I got turned on to thread, but I love it. I have a huge glass jar on my desk of different colors of embroidery thread that I will dump out and use to assemble palettes. Before COVID I would often go to Michaels and stand and stare at the embroidery thread, assembling various palettes together - it was one of my favorite things. Thread just inspires me in multiple ways. First there is the color and sheen of thread that I love, but it also inspires the marks I make in my paintings. I like for the marks that I make to mimic a tangled wad of thread with loops and stray strands sprawling out because this is also what my emotions and feelings look like to me, too - just tangled knots of thread where you can’t find the beginning or the end and it takes time and patience to untangle and sort out.
Once I have my color palette chosen, I will then assemble my supplies and get started painting! This happens in stages. I start with the two dominant colors - usually my main emotion color and an offwhite. I will usually let this dry before I move on. It is just a gradual building up of layers and layers. I try to be as messy as possible early on and gradually become more deliberate as I near the end of the process. Some paints I can use straight out of the tube, but a lot of the time I am mixing colors as I go while staying true to my original palette inspiration. Of course, I am open to spontaneous inspiration and adding additional colors, but I am always referencing my original color inspiration. This is also the part where I say some knowledge of color theory is nice to have (but again, not necessary). I say this because, as I start mixing the actual colors of my palette, I like for the overall palette to be tinged by the dominant, or main color. For example, in the painting where I was exploring the loneliness of motherhood, I used a deep, plum color as my dominant “emotion” color. The other colors that I added to that painting were mixed to varying degrees with that same plum color, or elements used to make that plum color. Technically, this makes it so that the overall palette is in harmony, and when colors not mixed with that plum color are added to the painting, they stand out even more, but also because the other emotions tied up in my feelings of loneliness are tinged by that loneliness.
I’ve shared before how this process has made it all the more apparent to me how one dominant emotion is usually shielding or tied up with other, supporting emotions. A good example is anger. In painting through my rage, there was a great deal of hurt and sadness hidden behind my anger. I think of it like a box with a lid. You are the box, the lid is the dominant emotion, and all the other emotions live inside the box. When we decide to validate the dominant emotion, AKA the lid, by giving it time and attention, we are taking the lid off of the box, and that’s when we can see what else is inside. That might be a poor analogy, but hopefully you get the idea. Another example of this is in a painting I just recently completed but have not yet shared where I was exploring feelings of resentment. I chose a dark, velvety, sap green with yellow undertones for my resentment because resentment from past hurts or perceived transgressions cloud my judgement in the present and can otherwise sour new experiences. In the early stages of developing this painting, it was obvious to me that there was some anger bound up in my resentment, but it wasn’t the blood red anger of my rage. It was more like a low simmering, bitter anger that lacked any sweetness whatsoever. This looked more like a sour, mustard green. Further into my exploration of my resentment, what I was surprised, and also not surprised, to find was a feeling of tenderness, like a sore spot. It felt like a former sweetness that had soured over time. This is where I added pinks, tinged with the same yellows from the greens.
Throughout this process, what has been the most profound, aside from really coming to know and understand my emotions, is coming to this place where I am not only truly witnessing myself, but also embracing the raw beauty of what I have always believed to be a weakness, or flaw. I am a sensitive person, I am an emotional person, and throughout my whole life I have been told that I am too emotional. I was always taught to ignore my emotions and “think with my head, not my heart” as if my emotions, as if my heart, had no validity or truth to them. I wasn’t taught how to feel or experience my emotions, so for much of my adult life, I would ignore them, guilt myself over them, and I always saw them as a problem with no real understanding of what to do with them. Painting my feelings and emotions has helped me to address the shame I have carried around them for so long. This experience has helped me to see the beauty in those emotions and the beauty of my whole self. In the yoga community, I feel like there is so much talk about “embracing the shadow side”, or practicing “self-love”, but no real discussion about what that looks like or how to do it. Painting my emotions and capturing the beauty of my “bad” emotions feels like what I imagine “embracing the shadow side” to be.
But for now, friends, that is all I have for you today!
I have forgotten the last few episodes to include a journaling prompt, artist activity, and recommended reading! I am going to try and do better about including those in every episode.
Journaling Prompt:
That being said, if you have a journaling practice and would like to engage with a journaling prompt, OR if you don’t have a journaling practice, and want to start, for this episode, I am going to ask you to write about your emotions. So for your journaling prompt, I want you to explore the following:
What emotions do you struggle to allow yourself to experience? Are you hesitant about expressing anger? Why? Do you avoid acknowledging sadness or hurt? Why? Do you express joy freely, or do you find it hard to allow yourself to be joyful? Why do you think that is?
What were you taught to believe about your emotions growing up?
Artist Activity:
Your Artist Activity for this week is to take a 15-20 minute walk somewhere familiar to you. Maybe it is your neighborhood, maybe it is your favorite park, take a walk somewhere you know and have been before and try to spot 5 new things you haven’t seen before. Bonus points if you can leave your phone in your car or at home for the walk.
Recommended Reading:
So You Want to Talk About Race by Ijeoma Oluo: It has taken me longer to read through “So You Want to Talk About Race” by Ijeoma Oluo, not because of the book itself, but more because of life haha, but I am about half way through the book now and I definitely recommend this book for the white listeners out there. Ijeoma Oluo’s book is kind of like a dictionary for anyone doing antiracism work. Each chapter she focuses on a topic related to racism and defines it from her perspective and experience of racism. So, she starts with defining racism, and then each chapter addresses other elements of racism like microaggressions, cultural appropriation, police brutality, and so on.
The Creative Habit by Twyla Tharp: I am not very far into this book, but I am already so appreciating Twyla’s insight into creativity and creating a creative habit. Basically, she shares how being an artist or creative person is less about the talent you have been given and more about the discipline of showing up and creating daily.
Ready to take the first step in your creative recovery?
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