Light in the Fog: Storytelling as Healing *

There are moments in life where time seems to stand still.

Witnessing a tragedy or living through a trauma has the capacity to change us at our core—and that flows into everything else that we do. These events help us to remember our humanity and our mortality. In the stillness following, one must reframe one’s life to fit the new eyes that come with experience. It is during those moments when the world seems crooked and out of place that I often turn to writing and art for solace. Creative pursuits can be a light in the fog when everything else seems hazy and surreal.

As a kid, I enjoyed writing my own stories, which I then illustrated. I categorized cross country moves, nightmares, and broken hearts. Like many artistic and sensitive teenagers, I found solace in writing poetry. I coped through drawing the world around me. Writing to observe my inner life was as natural as observing the outer world with my sketchbook. I developed both skills in tandem, even though their trajectories looked very different as I grew. The relationship between these two modalities of communication was just natural to me—though historically their link has always been strong.

Text and image have a long history, from hieroglyphics to children’s books. When we are children, our stories are mostly images. As we grow the pictures inserted into our literature slowly decrease, until eventually we have mere words in which to paint our favorite stories in our mind’s eyes. But text and image are still held in equal tension in the contemporary form of graphic novels, in advertisements, in social media, and even in some postmodern fine art. Artists like Jenny Holzer, Barbara Kruger, Ed Ruscha, and Glenn Ligon have experimented and elevated text as a fine art form. Eastern art has a rich calligraphic tradition that celebrates written forms as the epitome of grace and beauty. Over the last few years, my study of all this has provided the inspiration for text and image to collide in my own work over the last few years beyond some of the more commercial art modalities I also work in. It has been a rich experience to find the own intersection between image and words for a gallery setting. My early experiments with text and image borrowed more from Jasper Johns and his ability to integrate alphanumeric characters between layers of paint nearly to the point of ineligibility. I was borrowing the poetry and prose of others to bring to life. My own writing in earnest was still mostly a separate entity until recently—something my drawing professor recognized and encouraged, even though he was previously unaware of my relationship to poetry made by my own hand.

On a personal level, visual art has been more about creating scenes to draw from observationally to and find the places for stories that needed to remain unspoken. However, painting and drawing are just one of many ways to tell a story.

Trauma has a way of derailing current creative pursuits and requiring the maker to sit in the moment, and to tell a different story.

I remember the way time stood still for a season for me. Everything came to a halt.

I was the person who called 9-1-1. I still remember the shock of the loud boom, my dad’s face, my mom screaming. The ambulance lights. The hospital room. The white sheet. Monsignor Bill reading Last Rites.

I had to drop everything. The specific creative pursuit that I was engulfed in would need to be tabled until the next term. Only a week after the catalyzing event, I remember sitting outside of my drawing professor’s office struggling to find a creative solution to the mountain that suddenly became school during a family crisis. We were heading into our large format assignment, and I didn’t know how to take this project on the road, or what even to create. The enormous figure study I had hoped to engage with, and would that require long hours in the studio, was no longer possible for me as life was calling me toward other obligations.

My professors gave me the time off to process the pain of losing one of the most important people in my life. I was excused from finishing a series of watercolor images detailing the vulnerable emotions that my models had about their bodies. But how was I to even begin a large-scale work when my life was about to speed up with funeral arrangements, more people than I ever remembered meeting, and more condolences than I ever wished to hear in one place? How was I going to take my artwork on the road to bury my father in the shadow of the Rocky Mountains?

Poetry.

I turned to poetry. I also revisited an old process in abstraction in watercolor. I tore long strips of rag paper into a set of panels. I added a rhythmic set of lines stretching through each. Then I rolled each panel tight into scrolls that would be painted on through the span of a day—and in such a way that what would make a larger piece portable for the upcoming road trip. Unrolling each scroll at the end of the day felt like uncovering an ancient artifact after the journey’s end. Each line of color and marks represented an hour of time, and each color applied would represent one of the many emotions that I was riding.

I was a mess of tears, but the death of my father already had me writing again. I let steam of consciousness fill a page with hopes and angry musings and memories of days past—like when my father journeyed with me straight into the clouds, and I saw the adventurous gleam of a boy dreaming. Watercolor served as the backdrop for my handwriting, but also the visual cues for the intensity of the story of my first weeks in the absence of someone I had loved so long. The time keeping device of my creative process turned my raw emotion into color. My words would fill the cracks and my anger could vibrate in text atop marks of despair.

The result of this project, with my mentor’s input, became Eulogy, a ten-panel polyptych that is as much about my writing and poetry as it is my brushstrokes. It is poetry. It is experience. It is the story of my deepest loss and vulnerability made flesh into art. Eulogy is also that place where my role as a storyteller started to truly become evident in my creative work. My words on paper ceased to be mere decoration and started to build into the content of my subsequent paintings. It is the story of my grief process captured through color and text in real time as it was happening, along with my anger and sense of being overwhelmed through those dark days.

Every time that I unroll and display Eulogy for an audience, I feel the weight of that few weeks of my life. Sharing it has become an act of bravery and vulnerability. I feel the weight of the traumatic moment that catalyzed its creation. I feel the heaviness that is how I have changed, and how I can now divide my life into a before and an after. Yet, I have watched that piece speak to people in a way that none of my work ever has before it. I have always had a story in me to share, but specifying what parts of my story make it to the page was a clumsy process until Eulogy. The loss of a loved one, and the grappling with grief that comes with that loss, speaks to a universal experience of heart ache. The process has allowed me to be more empathetic to both my audience and to my models, whose stories I am translating into image in my current work. It is in sharing our stories authentically that we can find true community and connect with humanity. The trauma of my dad’s death has led to my becoming a better artist and writer, my finding my true voice as a human being, and the ability to touch my audience in a way that I had struggled with prior. Since that time, I now refuse to be anything except authentic to my story and the stories of others that I will share.

Time stood still the day my dad died, and for the immediate time following. But in that stillness, I discovered something about both myself and my creative process that I get to carry with me forever.

Eulogy is the centerpiece of my BFA show, which was on Display from November to December in Art and Design West at SIUE.

* Blog post originated as a Personal Literacy Essay for an English class