Mestiso Manifesto #13

Continuing from my last post, I was unable to create any painting worthy of submitting to the group show at Jacky Winter Gallery. I’ve ended up selecting a work that I’ve exhibited previously. The amount of pressure and stress I was causing myself over the situation wasn’t helpful. Because my resilience is extremely low due to burnout (how many times have I used that word in the last nine months?) it doesn’t take much stress to push me to my limit.

As I’ve mentioned previously, stress is a major trigger for my mental health conditions. With a burnt-out mind and body, I’m currently functioning in a constant state of stress. A lot of people think stress is just a feeling or a thought, when It’s really a physiological response that affects you both mentally and physically. When this stress degrades my mental, physical and emotional capacity, my depression and anxiety start to manifest.

To get more informed about resilience and burnout, I attended a workshop a few weeks ago. I had to complete a resilience index before the workshop and while I was expecting that my resilience level would be low, it was worse than what I thought It would be. Only 4% of the people in the workshop were in the extremely low resilient zone and I was one of them. While it’s not an official diagnosis, it kind of hit home at how badly it’s been affecting me. The suggestion from the index as well as the workshop facilitator, was to take it seriously and to take steps to rebuild resilience.

I’ve been looking into several things both professional and personal I need to do to help with this. The information I got in the workshop was overwhelming as it focuses on improving in the areas of IQ (Intelligence), EQ (Emotional Intelligence), PQ (Physical Intelligence) and SQ (Spiritual Intelligence). That’s a lot to try and manage in my current state. A lot of the information I’ve been reading revolves around improving your resilience though self-care. I’ve also been looking into seeing a psychologist that specialises in burnout.

To focus on rebuilding my resilience I’m stripping away a lot of things in my life to basics and reducing the number of stressors. Eventually I should have built enough resilience to reintroduce what I’ve taken out. I’m not setting a time limit on this; it defeats the purpose of what I need to do. I’ll get there when I get there.

While I can’t do much about my job as a designer, I’m going to need to learn to cope with how unhappy I am there somehow, especially since it’s my only source of income. So quitting is out of the question.

Okay now let’s get back into the art chat and what all this means for my practice going forward.

When it comes to my current struggles with painting, I’ve decided I need to move my focus away from exhibiting for the rest of the year. I want to shift my effort into developing and creating work for myself, not for a deadline or to flatter my ego. It will give me a pressure free zone to play in, and my hope is that by year’s end I will have developed a new solid body of work ready to be shown next year.

Next, I need to replenish my creative well. A term I’ve learnt from The Artists’ Way, a book by Julia Cameron that’s helped a lot of creatives. For some reason I keep hearing it mentioned all over the place, and since I do own a copy (which has sat on my bookshelf for close to 8 years now unopened) it will probably act as my guide during this time.

I do a lot of reading of art books already, so that will also continue as I like absorbing as much information as I can. There’s only so many books I can read on building an art career though, so I need to add some more variety into my collection.

When it comes to my skill and style development, I feel like my current toolbox is too limited to push me out of where I am and into where I want my work to be. So, I’m looking at learning new techniques, mediums, approaches and surfaces. I’m collecting books, searching for workshops and classes and planning to go to more exhibitions.

There’s a fear that my work is going to develop into something so radically different that it doesn’t connect to the body of work I’ve developed over the last four to five years. I just need to allow things to happen instead of trying to control everything. The resistance is just holding me back. That’s not to say I’ll completely abandon what I’ve been doing, it just needs revitalisation, and I feel the only way I’ll be able to do that is to create a new stream of work.