When Your Heart Wants to Break

When Your Heart Wants to Break

​"When Your Heart Wants to Break" - acrylic on cradled wood panel,  11" x 14" x .75".  Ready to hang (sides are painted; no need to frame.  Hanging wire is attached). Available here and at Artfinder.

When your heart wants to break, let it break. If tears want to come (or perhaps a flood of love or gratitude), allow that to happen. Grant your heart all the space it asks. To do so feels deliciously alive, because it locates you in what’s real in the moment.  - JAN FRAZIER, "Be Kind to Yourself"

Many thanks to artist Dotty Seiter, who introduced me to the wisdom of Jan Frazier in her blog post this week.  I've spent hours noodling this article and the concept of being kind to ourselves - which includes ​resting from wishing things were otherwise.​

It's been a wild week in the world.  It is temptingly easy to spend a lot of time wishing things were different.  Instead, I'm trying to let my heart break if it wants, to cry if I feel the tears, to give my heart the space it wants.   It is a feeling of overwhelming relief to think of this allowing as a self-kindness.

In the most recent Studio Visit with Brian Rutenberg,  Rutenberg says: Feel your own pain.  All art comes from sadness.   So, with my miner's headlamp firmly strapped on, I spent a day mining my own sadness in the first self-portrait of the year.  Again, thanks to Dotty Seiter for reminding me of the unbridled joy of blind contour drawing, which became the base start of this painting.

There was a kind of joy in the mining of sadness, tears in the allowing of heart breaking space, and relief in the self-kindness of not wishing for other than what is.  And as Frazier suggests in her article, it was ultimately restful.

I am only disappointed that the whole exercise did not include a big slice of pie. :)