When a Paint-By-Number Becomes Your Survival
In times of great duress in my life, making art has been the key to my survival. When things were challenging at home as a kid, I’d hole up in my room and paint or sit at the piano for hours. When anxiety and panic marked most of my days as a senior in high school, choir class was my only respite. When I couldn’t make sense of my internal world as a young adult, I’d journal until my hand hurt.
Today I finished a painting (ok, a paint-by-number; don’t judge, it was hard) that got me through the duress of the pandemic. On a wild 2020 outing to an exotic establishment known as Michael’s (the only other place I visited besides neighborhood sidewalks, the grocery store, and my friend’s backyard) I bought an “adult” paint-by-number to get me through the long winter ahead of covid isolation.
As I got started with the painting, I wondered if I’d ever actually finish it. Surely this painting was going to take me forever, but forever, it seemed, was how long it was going to take to get through the many lonely nights of the pandemic. Single and living alone, I battled excruciating loneliness during the deadliest days of covid. I needed the seemingly endless project of this painting to get me through the seemingly endless nightmare of the pandemic.
Working on the top quarter of the painting got me through a particularly dark chapter of depression and chronic feelings of abandonment. The isolation of my realities at the time had triggered some of my deepest insecurities that I am alone and don’t actually belong anywhere or to anyone. Instead of allowing myself to follow these dark thoughts, I’d light candles, turn on some music, and get out my paintbrushes.
My painting became my belonging.
Making my way to the second quarter of the painting, I was carried through a season where my work situation had become intolerable and toxic enough that I was scheming my exit strategies. Some work days, I would shut my computer at the end of the day, feeling so impossibly gaslit, minimized, used, and abused that the only way to return to the goodness of my own knowing was to dip my brush into that tiny paint pot and dab it onto it’s corresponding number until my body calmed again.
My painting became my grounding.
As I worked through the third quarter of the painting, I couldn’t believe I’d made it that far. One out of two rounds of the covid vaccine in my system and fresh out of quitting my toxic job, I rolled up my canvas and headed to South Carolina to stay with friends whose ten month old I’d never met before. In those soft green spring days cooking for my friends, playing with their delightful son, and painting as the sun went down, I became aware of the potential for new growth in me.
My painting became my healing.
The final quarter of the painting came together slowly as I spent my spring and summer days basking in the joy of my beloved, fully-vaccinated community, which included a new and tender relationship. I found I didn’t need my painting as much. In a season with significantly less duress than the one in which I’d given my first brushstroke, reopening my drying-up paints was simply a quiet activity for down time.
My painting became my hobby.
I felt such a fullness in filling in the final spots of color on my canvas this morning. This finished painting is visible, tangible, beautiful proof of my survival. There is no more visceral of an act to allow us to process the traumas of our lives than the practice of making art. It’s a companion and a practice that heals souls, re-grounds bodies, reminds us of our forever belonging, and sometimes is simply a delightful hobby.
Yes, my masterpiece was just a paint-by-number, but it was my survival and it is beautiful.
