The arts
This is a big topic, a KEY topic for me in my healing journey, bigger, even, than “why write.” In fact, without art, I would never have made the progress I have, and these posts would not exist.
So I am going to spend a couple of posts on art in healing, because there are several important parts to this.
In the fall of 2025, NPR’s Tonya Mosley interviewed Jane Fonda on her Fresh Air segment. In the course of their conversation about healing, the power of the arts came up:
“Jane, there’s a part of that speech, that SAG speech about the arts. And you say specifically that the arts have the power to create empathy, to understand a human so profoundly that you can touch another person’s soul.”
Tonya Mosley, NPR’s Fresh Air, September 2, 2025 – “‘We have to speak, we have to shout’: Jane Fonda is still an activist at 87.”
Touch another person’s soul…Oh my God, yes. I can honestly say that it is through the creations of various artists and actors — Madonna, Barbra Streisand, Meryl Streep, Viola Davis, and others — that I found comfort and wisdom, and received examples of powerful mothering and the “divine feminine” that I never received at home.
Of course, they don’t know this. But it was their masterful performances in their respective arts, delivered with all their hearts to the best of their abilities, that fed my soul when I needed it, and healed wounds like water on a drying, dying plant.
Madonna spoke in an interview of not being “the owner of her talent” but its master. It was given to her to allow it to move through and beyond her to those who need it. And she referred to her creative work in life as “medicine.”
Even scientists mirror these sentiments about the power of art to connect us all, and thus heal our lives:
“Here, around the fire, creative human expressions developed as an important layer of meaning-making and belonging… the activities we now call “the arts” began to take shape as an evolutionary priority to keep us alive. Art-making laid the basic foundation for culture and community among our earliest ancestors…these early gatherings helped to seed the social value of community. Researchers now know that participating in and fostering social connections in this way is akin to exercise for the brain: It improves cognitive function, lowers stress, and diminishes depression. …it allowed our species to build empathy and understanding with others.”
Susan Magsamen and Ivy Ross, Your Brain on Art: How the Arts Transform Us (203)
I could go on with examples, but frankly, I will speak to it myself.
The first medicine
Over the last several years, between the deaths of my parents, my intensive therapy work, and struggles to rediscover and release deep emotions, words were the last thing to come. They, along with understanding and awareness of what was happening to me, were frozen somewhere, unavailable and inaccessible.
I spoke in my therapy sessions…but even there, I struggled to identify what was swirling inside. It was a slow, deliberate process. And as to writing this memoir? It was an idea, but one I didn’t hold out much hope for.
How could I write when I had no words to express these huge feelings inside? WHAT could I write for another when I had no idea myself, what was emerging? And even if I could answer those two questions, I was swamped with fear.
So, as I share my list of tools that have allowed healing and made this writing possible, I will speak of writing last.
If anything was the first “medicine” for getting me on the path to healing, aside from therapy itself, it was art. From my earliest ages, I loved to draw and color. To this day, I remember with great love and excitement, my Jon Gnagy art kit and the world of order I learned with a map-making kit.
In elementary school, I LIVED for Friday afternoons because it was art class… unless the nuns took it away as punishment, which was the exact wrong thing to do for behavior problems. The art could have improved those situations by giving kids struggling with big emotions inside an outlet to express them. When you can’t find words for the emotions you are choking on, crayons can make all the difference.
The feel of those crayons on Fridays — first those big chunky Crayolas for little kids, then the boxes of twelve slender ones. And at home, that ULTIMATE joy with the box of 64 Crayola crayons WITH the sharpener in the box!
Even then, I could FEEL mood, subject, depth, and color, something that’s stayed with me over the years. I still LOVE Halloween and revel in the images of powerful, stormy oceans.
The tubes of paint
When I found I could only feel and drown, but not speak, I went back to art. Thank God I kept those oil paints and brushes.
Around midlife, when everything was falling apart, I got on a cleaning binge. If I couldn’t bring order to my life, I could clean out the attic.
I yanked boxes out of the sweltering cubby that summer, looked at things that were from the first half of my life, judged them to be no longer relevant, and started flinging things in the trash. Downhill skis and ski boots? Gone. An old set of golf clubs, gone too. Box after box, I just grabbed and flung. Right up to the box of oil paints.
Just as I was about to toss them all in the trash — after all, some of them dated back to when I was a kid and we took oil painting lessons from a local artist — I stopped. Tactile voices called to me through my fingers.
I remembered that woman – Mrs. Haddad. Wonderful woman and painter. Gentle, encouraging. It was the after-school thing to do at that time for many of us – take art lessons from her in her basement. I LOVED it.
I picked up an old tube of Alizirin crimson. Then cadmium yellow medium. And burnt sienna paint. My fingers slid over the sharp creases in the half-used paint tubes. I read the names off some more of the tubes and smiled as I remembered the first time we were to attend. We had to go to a local paint store with this list of oil paint colors and numbered brushes by type — sables, bristles. Palette knives. My stomach tingled with that sensation of joy and excitement I always felt going to her classes.
Could I still paint after all these years? I remember loving the smell of the paints. But what was the point? They were probably all dried up and useless, like so many other things in my life at that point.
I squeezed the tubes. To my surprise, they were still soft. Pliable. Could the paints still be good???
I stopped flinging things and pulled the boxful of art supplies out into the study. Kneeling down, I went through everything, taking stock of what was still there. A spark of something flickered in me.
Hauling everything down to the garage, I set up the small aluminum easel, squeezed some paint onto a sheet of disposable palette paper, and unwrapped a canvas I had. The blank expanse of white stared back at me in a challenge. It seemed to dare me to try: “Go ahead. Try to paint! Can you still do it?”
I picked up a brush, then hesitated in mid-air. How DID I do this? It had been decades. I almost gave up. But then I decided to get out of my own way. Shut off the brain and let the hand lead. Maybe if I moved some paint around on the canvas, it might all come back.
Prussian blue and titanium white were always Mrs. Haddad’s go-to colors to start a sky… and you always started with the background, i.e., sky. So I mixed up that sky-blue hue I remembered, swiped up a wad of paint, and started moving it around on the canvas.
It was awkward…at first, but…then something long-distant came awake. Like a sleepy bear awakening from a long hibernation, the brush sputtered, then slowly moved, spreading paint. It was jerky at first, but, bit by bit, it came back!
From then on, I made a point of painting. Seascapes. Undersea critters. New England fall scenes. Things I knew in my soul so they could come through me, down the brush, and onto the canvas like it was second nature. Somewhere within me, there was a part of my soul still alive and coming out in paint. I was so grateful I didn’t fling the paints that day.
A LOT of brushes
Fast forward to the last three or four years. Drowning in the power of long-buried emotions. Choking on pain so bad I wanted to sob… but couldn’t. Nor could I tell you exactly why I was so sorrowful. I just FELT it.
It was l like having some mysterious box sitting before me on the desk, shaking and banging away. Do I dare open it? I knew how the Ancient Greeks felt in that myth about Pandora’s box. If you open it, what will come flying out at you?
But I was in so much pain, I couldn’t stand it anymore. And I am the sort of person who, when things reach that point, just finally grits my teeth, damn any torpedoes, and digs in.
I ripped open a new canvas, tore open my “emotional Pandora’s box,” and started painting. Very different things came out this time. Like they had a life of their own. Things unlike the seascapes of the past.
These were scenes from my memory, horrible moments that had been seared in my brain during my childhood. Things that I had never been able to forget.
I didn’t plan on what came out first. In fact, it was like all of them were fighting to be first. Every memory was yelling “Me first!” and shoving each other out of the way to have their turn to escape my nervous system. It was the beginning of three years of unrelenting images that, one by one, tumbled out onto canvas after canvas.
So began my art journey to remembering…reclaiming…revisiting those moments, and, eventually, to writing this book. However, THIS TIME, each of those images was not going to be viewed through the eyes of a battered child, but with the eyes of a STRONG ADULT. And I will say that the emotions felt by that ADULT’S reaction to those images were absolute RAGE. But the box was open, and there was no stuffing anything back in it now.
I had no idea how long this would take, how fast or furious I would have to work. There was only one thing I WAS sure of:
I was going to have to wash a lot of brushes to tell this story.
Note:
I am seeking financial support to complete my memoir, work with an editor, and make a visit to my home state for fact-checking. Your help would mean the world to me as I take this step toward healing and giving voice to my journey.
Please like, comment, and share this post to help spread the word. The link for my fundraiser is on GoFundMe. Thank you for your support.
Tags: art, artist, creativity, painting, writing
Soul Mosaic 
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