Part 1:
The first angry face art work I made was a self portrait, see above. I created it after a huge release of anger which I realised I’d been holding on to for yeeeeeearrs. It was explosive, raw, uncontrollable, visceral and raging anger, and god it felt good to let it out. And feeling that good about it really took me by surprise. I felt instantly lighter and clearer, as if a great thick fog which had been following me around for years, had lifted to reveal a technicolour world where anything felt possible. Why the hell hadn’t I done this before?!
I sat for ages simply revelling in the marvellous feeling of release! I wanted it again. I tried to recreate it, I knelt down again in the very spot where I had screamed and shouted and released my full blown rage and this time I did it with my iphone camera facing me and clicked away. Then I went upstairs to the bathroom and did it in the mirror, again taking photos. Fuuuuuuck that’s a furious face, I thought. That’s my face and my rage, and I’ve never even seen it before. Again, why the hell not? Why hadn’t I ‘seen’ it? In both the visual and ‘recognition of my own feelings’ sense?
And that set me on my path to enlightenment, or at the very least to understanding myself better.
First thing I did was to set to work on creating a self portrait of my angry face. At this point I wasn’t completely aware of the fact that what I was doing was channelling and processing my anger through art. I see that much more now and I recognise that art is actually a language for me, one that is necessary to my survival in this world. But at the time, I just went with it and wasn’t giving much conscious thought as to what I was actually doing. It was as if I were being driven by something else to be completely honest, something from within me had taken hold and I had no choice but to go with it. It felt awesome!
Looking at the piece right now I can still feel the rage and the immense anger but also the release. It documents a very important moment in my life where I knew I could not go on as I had been and that I could not and would not deny my feelings in such a way, anymore. I also see imperfections and maybe an underdeveloped style but I refuse to berate myself for any of that because it’s a part of me at the start of, in a way, my new life. A life where I no longer deny my anger. I acknowledge it, I explore it, I harness it and I propel myself forward with it. It’s still very much ongoing, I have much to explore and I’m learning new things all the time, and that’s what’s important and the fact that I create art. I’m finally listening to myself and following what I want to do, what I need to do.
After completing the piece and my thoughts, life and artwork jumping off in a million and one different directions all at the same time, I came back to this topic of anger and realised there was more I needed to know and more artwork to be made. I felt like I’d done lots of looking in and trying to understand myself much more, with the help of my trusty psychotherapist, and along the way I was starting to see that much of what was making me angry was also making others around me, just as angry. And they were doing the same as me, bottling it up, having outbursts, feeling guilty, apologising profusely afterwards, promising themselves to try much harder to be a perfectly serene robotic human, feeling ashamed, or pretending it didn’t happen or that is was a weird blip and vowing never to let it happen again. And that pretty much sums up my relationship with anger for the last 38 years of my life! Not a very healthy one. And it turns out, I’m not alone in this. Turns out, there’s a whole fucking world out there feeling this way on a very regular basis and this, I thought, cannot go on.
So now, it seemed, it was time to start looking outwards. At this point I was still thinking of anger in a very broad and overarching way. I love a good TED talk, so went there first and simply typed in ‘anger’ and that’s when I first saw the title “The power of women’s anger” By Soraya Chemaly. Hmmmm I thought, I’ve never really thought of my anger being much to do with being a woman before. Probably because I’d never really given much in-depth thought to it before, I’d simply felt ashamed and then pushed it deeper and deeper down inside me until I was convinced it wasn’t even a part of me at all. I clicked play and wow, I had so many lightbulb moments it felt like my brain was on strobe effect at the shouting ‘yes, yes, yes!’ pretty much repeatedly for the 12 minute duration. I’m not sure what the neighbours thought.
If you have 12 minutes and are a human being, please watch, it’s so insightful and well presented. I’m sure you’ll take at least one useful thing from it. And no, it’s not just for women to watch, you know at least one right?
Part 2 to follow…
https://embed.ted.com/talks/soraya_chemaly_the_power_of_women_s_anger