Intuitive painting and mental health.

Intuitive painting and mental health.
Posted on 20-03-2022

How can the resource of intuitive painting influence the mental and emotional health of a person?

Intuitive painting, like many other spontaneous art tools, fundamentally offers a space for free expression, which we do not usually find on a daily basis. It has an exploratory aspect, this means that it allows us to play, something that does not find a place in day-to-day occupations.

Spontaneity and play are resources that boys and girls use constantly. At the beginning of development, the creative and exploratory capacity is fundamental for the subjective constitution. It is what allows us to recognize the environment, others, and ourselves as separate beings. In exploration, the world and one's own potentialities are known, and in this lies the germ of self-esteem.

The deployment of intuition and expressive resources puts us in direct contact with these constitutive childhood experiences. It allows us to re-observe ourselves and the environment in its potential for change. And this is related to health.

We are beings in constant movement, we experience many situations that we cannot control, and our ability to be flexible, to set limits when required, to disarm and build something new, is closely related to health.

Inflexibility, the rigidity of certain behaviors, and repetition are closely associated with psychopathological symptoms. A symptom is, among many other things, a mode of response that has been installed and that operates insistently and in different situations. Something becomes repetitive, recurrent, automatic, and unstoppable.

This is why, from the psychological point of view, prevention and health promotion become so important through tools that promote change and emphasize our expressive and transformative capacity.

We live in a world of disconnection from our own cycles and internal needs. We are governed by the market, by socially imposed norms and mandates, but we lose sight of intuition and contact with unconscious aspects. This lifestyle enhances the development of symptoms. There are no spaces for spontaneous expression, and the idea we have of our processes and possibilities is limited.

Intuitive painting offers an approach with internal questions that are often left aside. It is an action that symbolically, and recalling children's games, goes beyond the rules and the "should be" to allow the unexpected, the new, the unusual, and the unexpected to emerge. This experience confronts us with the possibility of change in general and keeps us in contact with diversity.

Painting intuitively implies doing it without preconceived ideas or forms, getting carried away by what is emerging, without thinking rationally according to theories, and without following tutorials. It is a way of allowing self-expression and transcending self-censorship. 

The expression and observation of one's own aspects is a promoter of health, it allows giving rise to emotions that, if repressed, can lead to psychological difficulties. It is, at the same time, a resource through which to work on identity, the feeling of being and being in the world, or, as Winnicott said, the feeling of existing, of being alive.

 

Thank You

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