Energy has been on my mind a lot lately. I don’t know if this feeling is familiar to you, the feeling that you’re just skimming along the surface of life and not getting properly stuck into anything? I’ve been feeling like this for some considerable time, particularly in relation to my painting and it’s really bloody frustrating.
I realised at some point that it was a lot to do with energy and how I’ve been kind of squashing it down, suppressing it - and when I questioned that idea a bit more, because why would you suppress your own energy? - I understood that energy = emotion. In 16th century France the word ‘émotion’ was used to describe a social disturbance, from the Old French ‘emouvoir’ meaning ‘to stir up’. Both ‘motion’ and ‘emotion’ stem from the Latin ‘movere’ (to move). It wasn’t until later that emotion was used in a psychological context.
(This shouldn’t have been news to me. For a really long time the line ‘anger is an energy’ sung by John Lydon in Public Image Ltd’s song ‘Rise’ has been a bit of a mantra for me. Sometimes you can know things without acknowledging what exactly it is that you know).
So I had to dig around a bit in my emotions to find out what I was repressing that was having the knock-on effect of killing my energy. And with the help of my long-suffering therapist I acknowledged some things I’d been avoiding, did some work there - and something shifted. There was a feeling of expansion and renewed hope.
Alongside this psychological enquiry I was also trying to access my buried energy by way of paintbrushes and dumbbells. I let loose on some big pieces of paper - big because there needs to be room for physical movement, paper because it’s not precious. And I was going to the gym to lift heavy weights - not stupid heavy, just heavy enough to make me sweat and shake a bit, ‘cos that’s where the gold is. By gold I mean that’s where the energy gets truly engaged, exactly as it does when I ditch the self-monitoring and paint freely and perhaps a little bit aggressively.
This is where I want to be with my work. I want to be tapping into that energy and not holding back. I know that this is where my best work is. I’ve seen hints of it before but I want to make it the norm.
And the brilliant thing about it is that energy then connects to you, the person that’s looking at my art. If I’m painting with that door closed on my energy, my emotions, then none of it gets into the painting and it’s just kind of dead and it will make you feel like boiling your head. But if I’ve painted with that door wide open, the energy you’ll get from my painting might inspire you to, I don’t know, go for a run, or weed the garden, or bake a cake. It might shake you out of a stagnant state, wake you from a daydream. It might make you think about the energy that’s zipping between all of us all the time, the energy that connects you and me. The energy of nature and of life itself.
Maybe you’ll pick up a paintbrush or some dumbbells and excavate your own energy.
(Next time I’ll talk more about the connection between your energy and paintbrushes, and how I might be able to help).