WENDY LaGREEN, PsyD
Working during Covid as an artist and also meeting with my clients has been very insightful. When a client comes in for psychotherapy, they often feel a sense of disequilibrium. This chaos and imbalance is an important force in the making of art. Creating helps me to understand that disequilibrium is often the beginning of new solutions, discoveries and understandings as we experiment with new thoughts and images of what life and art could become. When my clients make art, they begin practicing with the concepts of disequilibrium and chaos. The process of being creative becomes a safe metaphor for discovering new ways to see our lives and relationships. When that feeling of chaos arrives again, the client learns to search for new pathways. The art becomes the historical reference. I often discover so many new things about myself and how I interpret my feelings about the world around me. Art is a perfect way to help humanity see their thoughts and feelings through a visual form while finding new tools to manage our difficult world.
We All See the Same Sunset
(Mixed Media, 12” x 16”)
I recently discovered my DNA relatives through testing. I found that my family line dates back 15,000 years. Today, I have relatives that match part of my DNA on every continent. My ancestors lived and died through plagues and expulsion due to their religion, race or nationality. Researching these historical facts helped me to understand myself better. We are all part of this existence we call humanity.
Carl Jung explained this interconnectedness as the collective unconscious, which is made up of intelligence and intuition that is inherited, instinctual and shared through ancestral memories and is evolutionary.
This artwork is a watercolor merged with part of a textile I had knitted. What we often leave behind are the creations we have made which inherently belong to all of us. Landscape is constant and clothing is sometimes sacred.