Channelling Emotion

As I have mentioned before, the word ‘channelling’ gets used a lot in modern day English and has different uses. Collins dictionary defines its use as a verb thus:

“If you channel your energies or emotions into something, you concentrate on or do that one thing, rather than a range of things.”

I find art as a way of processing emotion very useful and often explain it this way as twpo separate ‘applications’.

1.     You can ‘lean in’ to emotions and channel them into the creative work.

2.     You can lean away from emotion and use art as a distraction.

Often, students of mine who have done art therapy intensively can find the first application can take them away from being able to use art in the second way. They can get stuck in the first application and it can make art more associated with difficulty than with ease and can take the joy away.

I find personally that the second application can come in very handy on occasion. Even the calmest of us can struggle at times with upset, anger or frustration. A surge of emotion can feel unwelcome or strange to deal with as we may not be used to feeling so emotional.

Processing emotion is also something that people can get very stuck with.  Not being able to find a useful or constructive release for emotions and getting stuck with feelings they cannot process is common.

Channelling the emotion into a creative release is a very cathartic process and one that can be very productive. It is the opposite of a creative block, there is a rush to fill the open page with words or the blank substrate with marks and colour. Using non-figurative art to release these feelings can also feel primal. Once released, calmness can be restored, or you can go back in over several sessions to let go of the energy created by the emotion.

This transmuting of otherwise destructive or damaging emotions can be a beautiful thing. Often the artist is the only one who knows how the process felt. The end result may be bright and bold but may have come from anger or frustration. The work may have been created over several sessions so that different emotional energy was at play at different times.

This is what happened with this series, the anger and frustration released onto the white surface in an emotional vomit of colour. Paint was used in a variety of thicknesses, sgraffito was used to gouge into the surface, oil pastel was added, some activated and some not. Hands and fingers were used, as were brushes and scraping tools. There was a physical and emotional release.

So, channelling is not necessarily just a spiritual process, using emotion is also a valid channelling process.