Art Therapy for Beginners

Over years of joining art therapy classes, I’ve learnt tricks. I don’t have any fine art skills, so I choose the easier tasks when I can’t or don’t want to draw.

The teacher says that art therapy is for everyone. Beginners welcome. No technical skill is required. It is okay just to play. Art therapy is just an opportunity. You can’t be bad at it. Would you like to “play with the materials?” There’s no right or wrong. It’s a creative process that begins when you enter the room and ends when you say so. It’s an experience for patients in mental health settings as an alternative to traditional talk therapies. It helps process emotion.

For example, you could paint a glass bowl. You take a small sponge and pour a colour into a palette. A metallic colour is great. It forms a shiny gold pool on the palette, which you can then dab onto your bowl. And for half an hour, you can paint your bowl, and then leave with a totally different item from what you entered with. In a colour you choose. And this is enough. This is enough art for the day.

I am not technically skilled at art, but I enjoy sitting in a room with other people and painting. I find time passes easily. There is a busy-ness. Sometimes time stops as you look up and notice everyone in different stages of creation. We share materials. We don’t speak. There is a frantic pace with an unclear purpose. It is sweet to sit in silence, but supportive to have a witness. It is grounding to have a prompt, a class, a goal, and a teacher. It is a frame, and actually quite boundaried, after it all.

The art therapy teacher begins class by prompting us with a task. Sometimes the task is too specific. The therapist tells us to draw a tree, representing our supports. Or a hand that represents our family. Or a face. Or a house. A word. Love. Home. Kindness. Sometimes there is a concept. The prompt doesn’t matter. It is just a way to start moving.

Prompts can be challenging. I don’t always know what I’ll create when I start. Sometimes I do. Occasionally, at the outset, it’s entirely obvious what I need to convey. Sometimes, the flow guides. Other times, as I start painting, I find one corner of the page blossoming, and I use this to lead the whole page. Sometimes, I turn over the page and restart with a new direction. Sometimes, when I look at the completed page, I have no idea how I created that, conceived that, or what it means.

When I feel stressed about my skill level, I turn to old methods I’ve used before. I think of tricks. Maybe this can be an “abstract” piece. I can draw shapes. I can draw spirals. I can write the alphabet again and again, a trick I learned from Lynda Barry’s creative process, which she turns to when she is stuck. ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ. Then Start again. The alphabet resets.

Lynda Barry is just one of many “creativity teachers” available – – such as Elizabeth Gilbert, Ivan Brunetti (Barry’s teacher) and Julia Cameron. Barry is not well-known in Australia but is lauded in her hometown of Seattle, Washington.  Back in 2015, she wrote in the Guardian: that she has spent her “entire life” focused on one question: “What is an Image?”.  She has written two books on the subject. And she’s not quite sure what images are either.  “The cool part is, now I’m 60, and I’m pretty sure I’m not going to answer it, which is great, which means I get to keep chasing it, you know? Otherwise, you’re just catching death. ‘I caught ya! Oh, shit …’”

What are these blobs we transfer onto the page? What is an image? How does art therapy work? What is “the process?” Does it matter?

Art therapy can be for everyone. You don’t have to be skilled. If you’re not good at it, it might seem a stretch to dabble and stumble through a process that feels unfamiliar. But the paper doesn’t judge, and creating feels good. When the world feels big, or busy, or like a book missing a page – I love to draw. I like making scrapes on the page, with no consequence.