Tag Archives: home

Where we come from: Place and Colour

fullsizeoutput_222

‘I know where you are coming from’.

If I hear this is a group therapy context, I’m expecting it to be followed up either by a version of – let me tell you about my own experience – or – but I think you’ve got it wrong here. It’s a statement of solidarity and a permission to disagree at the same time, which could be seen as another version of family: People who know the most about you, who can be on your side and also oppose you.

Our language is awash with geographical metaphors used to convey often complex emotions and interactions. I’m increasingly pondering the “geographical’ in that sentence, having spent years of talking and writing about internal landscapes. I’ve always been focused on the emotional content, but now I’m taking the actual physical terrain more seriously.

I’m wondering about our earliest experiences of place, and the ways in which we attach to/detach from this place. There’s no easy correlation, as in people born by the sea always want to get to the coast, or those whose first years were spent in high rise flats love climbing mountains. But I believe that there are influences; that the impact of place is never erased, however subtle or hidden. Perhaps rather than attach to a location that can be described in terms of contours and features, we resonate with the mood of a place? So how do we ascribe a mood to a place ?

Colour and light immediately come to mind. Beyond any simplistic associations – cheerful yellows, angry reds, gloomy greys and so forth – colour plays upon, expresses and creates emotion. In a recent tribute to Howard Hodgkin, Colm Toibin writes,

‘There was no colour in his work, he emphasised, for its own sake; he was not involved in making decoration. Nor did he allow colour to stand for some generalised set of emotions or experiences. He always thought of himself as a representational painter. The paintings arose from precise occasions, precise emotions, from a memory, something very specific and personal.’ (The Guardian 11.03.17 )

Colour is for serious artists. I describe myself as someone who is ‘not good with colour’, but that is a sentence, like the one that precedes it, which is too glib for comfort. I like greys – and blue-greys, green- greys, brown-greys and even yellow-greys. Why?

There are many possible factors, but the one that I am thinking about here is childhood landscapes of the Thames estuary. I remember it as muted, overcast, and yes, mainly grey! I’m not sure if it is a landscape that I am ‘attached’ to, but I do feel that its colours have seeped into me somehow. In my sketches I have periods where I consciously try to use vibrant, noisy colour – but I always either blot it away or just don’t like the end result. Colour and place are entwined. I’m not at home in hot vibrant noisy places any more than I am drawn to hot vibrant colour.

Psychotherapy enables us to go beyond our early programming, but reminds us that certain aspects of ourselves are foundational. I’m thinking that also applies to the way we respond to and use colour. It can connect us to the geography of our lives and that of our preceding generations, and it can introduce us to new ways of appreciating the current places that we and others inhabit. So to challenge the idea that I am forever entranced by greys, here are a few of my latest lino prints. You may know where I’m coming from, but look where I’ve got to!

fullsizeoutput_225

fullsizeoutput_223

Fresh eyes and new perspectives

Leave a reply

Urban sketching has taken off since last July’s course in Oxford. Firstly, there has been another 3 day Urban Sketchers workshop based in Coventry, and secondly two of us have organised SketchCoventry, a monthly group that does just what it’s name says.

Although I’ve lived here for over 15 years, I’ve never felt particularly attached to Coventry, so when Jo Roberts and I were working on the ‘home’ project, I was very clear that Coventry was just a place that by chance I had ended up in and no more.

The 3-day workshop was all about perspectives, and it attracted quite a few sketchers who had never been to Coventry, as well as some locals like myself. We began in the Old Cathedral, abandoning any attempt at a classic perspective, which was such a liberating way to begin!

Other challenges included drawing without looking at the paper – the basis for this sketch of the cafe at The Herbert Art Gallery.

We tried a fish eye lens perspective, which was really difficult for me, as well as wrestling with the more familiar vanishing point version.

All the while I could hear other perspectives on Coventry itself from my fellow sketchers. Their reactions were very surprising! I expected them to rave about the market, Coventry’s jewel in the crown, but their appreciation of some other aspects came as a shock. My favourite comment came from a Danish woman who described the city as a “fascinating blend of the brutal and mediaeval”!

Seeing the familiar and disregarded through the eyes of others made me appreciate the city in a way that I hadn’t managed before. It’s like taking someone you’ve known for ages to a party and discovering that other people find them new and exciting. We can think that we know someone so well that there is nothing that they can say or do that will surprise us. We are sure we have exhausted all the possibilities, which can be comforting but inevitably dull. Then some one else is introduced into the picture and we realise that, after all, there were things we didn’t know or hadn’t seen.

Put a new member into a therapy group and listen in amazement as some long standing member talks about an aspect of their life that you have never heard of! Watch them shine or shrink and marvel at their transformation! Beware of thinking that you know someone ‘through and through’, whether this is you partner, parent, child – or even long-term client! Other people bring fresh perspectives that challenge our own limited vision.

We put people and places into boxes and are boxed up ourselves. Being able to open them, see round the corners, re-evaluate, is central to psychotherapy . Sketching too is a great way to re-engage with the familiar. It requires us to look at what is there rather than assume we already know what it looks like. And just in case we get too complacent about our new vision, a glance at all the other sketchbooks reinforces that there is always more to see.

PS. There are more sketches making their way onto the Urban Sketching page – I haven’t found a way to post blogs on both pages yet!

What does home mean to you?

1 Reply

What does home mean to you?

We wrote this in the middle of a large blank sheet of paper, expecting that there would be few if any people who might answer the question.

“Home is where the heart is’, I added on a sticky note, just for encouragement.

So began the end of the Home project that Jo Roberts and I have been working on for some months. To draw it to a conclusion we had decided (Jo’s idea) to offer to talk about what we had been doing and display the work that had been created along the way. This was very new territory for me… a sort of road show where the talk and discussion took centre stage, and the “art” was just the backdrop.

Jo planned to talk about how her childhood home eventually became a house, and her ‘grown-up’ house turned into a home – something that involved a real life pilgrimage. We put up the work that we had produced, and failed miserably to take a decent photo!

I ‘d realised that I had been drawn to this project because I was already working on related themes, so some of the display featured completed works. There were a number questions I was asking myself and the audience: The acrylic paintings in the “leaving” series visually asked ‘what have we lost?’The grey landscape that stirred up very conflicting responses was in part about searching – ‘what are we looking for?’One response to this question – warmth and companionship, presented itself in the ‘woodburner’ series of sketches and prints: Another – stillness and that which lies within – found its way into the linoprints. Finally, ‘what do we fail to see’ was illustrated by sketches from my recent ‘urban sketching’ course in Coventry – more about that later!

All these questions, in various guises, come up again and again in any long term psychotherapy.They are fundamental recurring themes in the attempt to make sense of our lives and those around us.

Amazingly, over thirty people turned up. …some at the Althorpe Studios in Leamington, and some at Rugby Art Gallery.. and we explored a fascinating range of topics. People shared their experiences of feeling at home, whether in houses or landscapes or with loved ones, and touched upon moving memories. We discussed our attachments to places, people and things, intrusions and invasions, domestic objects, and cars!

We thought about how emotional security has become entwined with the physical home, the cultural and historical baggage around home ownership and the changing patterns brought about by the financial downturn. I particularly enjoyed the opportunity and the challenge to think more about the cultural, socioeconomic, political and historical context for the identification of house with home.

I came away with the big sheet of paper, now covered in sticky notes. Home means ….

“ where my partner is”

“deciduous woodlands”

“inside”

“rural England”

“where all the family come together”

“woodlands”

“somewhere I feel comfortable”

‘my safe haven where people I love live”

‘my stability, a power base and ultimate comfort and joy”

‘a half forgotten place far away in time and life’

“memories, emotions, investment of love”

‘security, warmth, love, safety”

“a yearning to close the door”

and finally

“comfort, security, and a place to grow beetroots”….

These are some of Jo’s works – more on her website.

Searching for home in dark places

10 Replies

The word ‘home’ is dripping with emotional colour. It evokes so many images, tangled with family, security, memory – and all so different for each one of us. I’ve been collaborating with Jo Roberts on a project called just that – ‘Home’ – and it has led us down some very diverse pathways.

I am interested in the feeling tone, the emotions that the word conjures up; a sense of security, of comfort, of being held, of belonging, of things being alright, for example. Because of who I am and what I do, however, it is the absence rather than the presence of these elements that strikes me most forcibly. Most of my working life is spent trying to come to terms with and ameliorate the effects of the lack, the loss or the inadequacy of the emotional ‘home’.

Psychotherapy as I understand it is a relationship between therapist and client that emotionally involves all parties. As a therapist, my own personal experiences are very relevant – although I don’t usually talk about them, they inform my understanding and responses. I can travel to some dark places with people and feel ‘at home’! In the world of therapy, that all seems unremarkable, and it is only recently that I have begun to appreciate that these dark places, translated into my new ‘art’ world, have a different impact.

Maybe it’s a peculiarity of the art groups I belong to, but there don’t seem many gloomy or miserable images in the room. Cheery blue skies, winding lanes, sun -dappled paths, copied holiday photos, and a spattering of flowers. It took me a while to realise that I was a bit out of step.

Searching for Home

‘Hope you’re not still feeling like that’, someone said, looking at my grey landscape.

There has been a lot of publicity lately about mental health, and how as a society we need to be more tolerant and less fearful of the wide range of psychological struggles that are going on in those around us – and how we need to invest to create a decent healthcare system that responds to this need. There is still a stigma lurking around ‘mental illness’ despite efforts to overturn this, and once outside of my familiar world of counselling and psychotherapy, I can sense it. It has taken me by surprise, this subtle pressure to tidy away the darker and messier bits of myself lest they cause any disturbance to others.

Much of the pressure comes from myself of course, because I have internalised those unspoken rules about what makes an acceptable person. We absorb these rules in the process of becoming a member of any society, without even being aware of it, and this process of internalisation is brilliantly efficient at maintaining the existing definitions of who and what is acceptable. The gold standard person is still white, male, heterosexual, of a certain social class, of ‘sound body and mind’ – and those of us who fail the test in any or all parts have to struggle with our own harsh self judgments.

Maybe an important part of the definition of ‘home’ is a sense of acceptance; home is a place where we can put down the burden of self-criticism and feel comfortable, however and whoever we are. How on earth do I do that in a painting, I wonder?