The Art of the Day: Art Journaling

 

 

“To follow the movement of our emotions allows us to retrace the formation of our lives from the inside. Thus, you will begin to recognize how your day unfolded from within yourself."

~ Ira Progoff

What feelings did you have through the day yesterday?  Not just one, you had a myriad of feelings.  Did you miss some?  Do you lay down in bed and a million thoughts roll through your head and they are not usually positive.  Maybe you ought to try what I, and thousands of others are doing.  Art journaling.

If your days are melding one into the other and you are beginning to feel numb, then, art journaling is for you.  If, at the end of the day, you do not even remember what you did, of any account, then, again, there can be a numbness and a loss of what has meaning to your day.  Somehow, we can lose the PRESENCE/PRESENT of each day.  By simply beginning to record your day, day by day, evening by evening, you take back the meaning of your life.  Art journaling is not diary-keeping.  It is a way of putting what resides in your soul, what takes up space in your soul, for a day, for a moment in time, to express that which you might not be able to express in any other way but symbolically.  Only you need to know that you have recorded time and space you have taken up.  The more you do art journaling, the better you will get t finding that pearl of great price in every single day you managed to get through another day, knowing it is unlike any other day in your life.  It is a way to live authentically. 

If you choose morning to work in your art journal, you might do a dream analysis, or you might do some remembering of the day before and whatever you end up putting on a page might come from watching a YouTube presentation (there are thousands to watch and to be inspired by).  Perhaps you might record a dream you had during the night before.  How do fragments of your dream carry on through your today?  What was the theme?  There is a lesson in every dream we remember.  What was the lesson?  Perhaps you might research and find out what the dream was, symbolically, about and express that on an art journal page.

Throughout the day, try to find a time for the peace and meditation time and try to keep to that schedule, if you can.  If you choose evening to work on a page, maybe spend a few moments considering what happened during the day that impacted you even in some slight way.  Consider what detail of the day stood out to you.  Maybe there is more than one thing and you might do more than one page. 

There are so many things you could focus on as you begin a page.  Give things a few moments to be considered and then simply begin.  Let your soul express itself.  Do not worry about techniques, how fine an art journal page needs to be, because it does not need to be fine at all.  There are no hard and fast rules.  Just making marks might be all you can come up with but you will know every mark, in any medium, by its truth.  There is always a feeling, a tone, of a day.  Maybe you might focus on that.  What did you desire, what were you anxious about, what was negative about the day?  Yes, it cannot always be pretty happy happy.  Sometimes you might have been mad as hell and need to scratch paper in some way.  As days go, there are relationships throughout the day that affect you.   Did you feel loved?  Did you feel abandoned in some way?  Maybe you might do a simple cut and paste collage that expresses these things, without words. 

Did you have an epiphany during the day?  I am a lifelong learner, as we all are, but maybe you consciously want to try something new that you have never tried before.  Maybe it is ALL new.  Maybe you might start a page following a YouTube presentation using some new technique or focusing on something you are trying to express artistically.   Ad, suddenly, it all pulls together and becomes some expression of Self. 

No matter what you intend, do not intend it, for a page.  Let the blank page be fresh and in need of some kind of marks, stamping, color, shape, and go from there.  As you do art journaling more and more, your soul seems to already be prepared and will express itself because you have given it permission to express itself. 

Simply get something t art journal in.  No expectations.  Look into art journaling on Pinterest.  You will gain myriads of ways to document your space-taking for a day or a night.  Do not give up on a page.  If you start to feel frustrated, turn the page.  Leave it and let it rest and brew and stew and come back to it in an hour, a day, a week, a month, a season.  Stay curious.  Let art happen however it will happen and, yes, there will be days/pages, where you really really do not like part or all of what you did.  Do not censor your page.  Let it be what it is.  It will be what it will be for a reason.

Why not give it a go?

I turn 75 Monday morning.  There could be 75 pages on what turning 75 means to me.  The page ended up being what it is.  I owe no one an explanation for the page.  It says it all there for me, not for anyone else.  I do not do pages with an observer in mind.  It is for me and I know what every mark on that double-page spread stands for. 

©Carol Desjarlais 7.23.22