Paint the pain away

Art Therapy on a budget

First of all let me preface this by saying I am by no means an artist, I wouldn’t even consider myself a painter. Nor for that matter am I a therapist, or even all that well put together. I’m simply someone who paints for fun.

Things all began when I was around the age of thirteen, like many nerdy kids I got very into model making – Airfix, Warhammer, you name it. I’d spend hours in an evening painstakingly adding details to yet another tiny figurine to add to my collection. However due to things like cost, and the surprisingly slow realisation that this wasn’t as cool as I thought, I stopped.

It wasn’t until last year that I even picked up a paintbrush again, and my how I had missed it.

After roping in a few friends and flatmates, spending less than the price of three pints at Action on paints and canvases, as well as buying a bottle of wine and some other things to take the edge off of painting together – we were ready. What came after was one of the most pleasant and relaxing nights-in I’d had since the pandemic began. We must have spent six hours sat in relative quiet, occasionally admiring each-others works in progress and muttering to ourselves about this or that colour.

Shroooooooomsies

So why bother to write about this at all?

Well, with the ongoing discussions around mental health on campus and the article written last month about it, I thought I’d throw my hat in the ring. Hopefully this doesn’t come across in the same way as one of those “exercise/meditate your way out of depression” conversations, but there is something very relaxing and at least mildly therapeutic about being absorbed in painting (or art in general for that matter). Now, I could wax lyrical about studies and therapeutic practices about art therapy, or go on (for far too long) about Marxist theories of alienation and the need for people to have an interaction to production that is not driven by the profit motive in modern society, and so on... But to keep things brief, painting is fun, fairly cheap, and surprisingly low effort.

As for the mental health side of things, I for one, am not particularly good at checking in with myself (toxic masculinity ‘n all that). However, I do notice that both the content of what I’m painting and my wandering thoughts whilst actually painting give a nice insight into how I’m feeling at the time. Additionally, there’s something relaxing and almost meditative about painting, with the texture of brushstrokes resembling zen gardens at times.

So much so that at the end you can take a step back and say “shit, did I make that?” Obviously not every time will be perfect, or even good, but you can always come back later and try to improve or touch things up – hell you can just paint over the whole thing and start over. And having something in life that doesn’t matter when it goes wrong, and you have the complete freedom to fuck up, for no consequence at all, is sorely needed at university.

So, if you’re bored one evening, tired of rewatching the same series on Netflix, or your favourite YouTube channel hasn’t uploaded in a while. Grab some friends or go alone and spend a few euros on a canvas, some paints and a brush or two and have a go! In the words of the great Bob Ross “we don’t make mistakes, only happy little accidents”.

by Kieran Salt