Art As Therapy

I started painting when I was 30 years old as a therapeutic exercise. I had gone through much trauma from my childhood and suffered through depression and anxiety. When i was 30 years old I tried to commit suicide one night and God spoke to me that night. He said what are you doing i have a plan for your life.

The anxiety and the fear did not leave in the moment that I heard God's voice, but they began a path into a new direction. I committed myself into a psychiatric hospital. My hope was that they would help me to overcome the tormenting thoughts that I was having. I thought that I would kill myself so I thought it would be good to have somebody watching me to stop me from doing that. I was in there only for about 10 days, but it was a very strange experience. When I came out I don't think I was much different, but I also did a six-week course call cognitive behavior therapy.

I guess I learned some tools on how to change difficult thought patterns. Later, as a Christian, I got training in Inner Healing of the mind, when I got saved, which has been much more effective for me. The lord has transformed me from glory to glory and strength to strength through the changing of the inner thoughts of the broken man. The bible says that the truth shall set us free.  When I learned to repent and forgive and when I began to seek new thoughts regarding demonic lies that I agreed with as the Holy Spirit exposed them, then I started to experience a new liberty.  Demonic forces started to give up their hold.  I felt set free and a deep abiding peace.  God makes all things new, and I am now stronger. It comes by transformation that comes by the Holy Spirit.

But when I was doing the cognitive behavior therapy course one aspect of that course was art therapy. We weren't given the best supplies, but I had some old watercolors and some plain paper, and I just began to paint what was on the inside of me. I had gone through a divorce and lost my children, so I painted myself and my daughter climbing up a mountain together. Maybe it was the same mountain that we would both have to climb in our lives but there was something liberating about that exercise.

Six months later I climbed the Rocky Mountains which struck me as very similar to what I had painted in my dream. It was the beginning of me realizing that we can capture prophetically things that are going to come in our lives.  When I painted myself climbing a mountain, I had never done that before in my life. It was the beginning of finding myself in nature alone with my thoughts and God.

So, in this way my art came out of my need to express my innermost thoughts.  There are images and subjects that I paint over and over, and I don't always know what they mean. There are times that I paint old men in hats. I have no idea why I do that. I’m just drawn to it. I paint horses, eagles, and lions. Sometimes the eagles are screeching, and the lions might be roaring. There is an inner cry or scream that wants to come to the surface.  There are times that I paint sailboats floating across calm water and sometimes they are going through storms.

There are times people ask me to interpret the images that I am painting but really the interpretation is the painting. It is for others to determine exactly what I meant. I'm just painting what comes from the inside and it's not always easy to put that into words.