When you can’t do the work you normally do…do something different!
I learned a very valuable lesson 13 years ago when going through my first divorce. Do not paint Byzantine Icons while going through a divorce. At that time I thought it was my priest and “the Church” punishing me by suggesting that I take some time off from painting icons. I did not fully understand the spiritual connection between the icon and the icon painter, even though I had been working in the medium for 8 years at that point. That is until I looked at some of the faces that I was painting. They had the look of sheer pain on some of them. I tried to explain it away to those who the icons were painted for, but they saw the same look that I saw. Lesson learned.
Fast forward ten years. I continued to paint icons during the time after Lori left me, leading up to my second divorce. This is the divorce that pretty much rocked my world, hit me like a side hook out of nowhere and caused me to take a huge look at my life, my views and reconsider the company that I keep. I kept a careful watch over the faces that I was painting to make sure they did not look pained, but there was a moment when I had to stop painting icons. The day the divorce was final I needed a creative output, but knew that I could not paint an icon due to how the look on the icons face might turn out. I did not want to paint the pain that I was experiencing into a sacred object. What I did was to gather up all of my old craft paint bottles left over from painting nutcrackers with my first ex-wife over a decade earlier and get an available canvas. I then began to slowly drip paint, make paint splotches, make lines of paint and other such marks on the canvas in various different colors. I let go of any and all emotions that I was feeling while doing the paintings and even listened to some of my favorite music-neither of which is suggested when painting icons. I enjoyed doing this and found that it gave me the creative release that I needed at the time. I did a number of these paintings during this time period. Being an iconographer I was not well versed in modern art, but several of my friends upon showing them the paintings said the paintings reminded them of a famous modern American expressionist and that I should continue doing them.
The lesson learned here is that when you can’t do the work that you normally do, find something creative that you can do until you can get back to your normal work. Who knows, you might even find that you enjoy the new work and have broadened your artistic horizons.
