Wow, here’s another song that played a deep and important role in my music therapy internship. It represented a shared moment of profound intimacy between me and an end-stage HIV/AIDS patient. A relatively young man, not much older than me. This song had long been an expression of my own feelings of loneliness and isolation and yet hope for connection. A few weeks later, this patient passed away, the first death I experienced as a clinician-in-training. And, strangely, a few months later, I had a dream about a good friend of mine catching a plane at the airport, the sensation of two kindred souls just missing each other, bearing great similarities and sharing many experiences, but never getting the timing quite right to just get together and be in the moment. Upon waking I realized it was a direct reference by my subconscious to this song and the line “Tom, get your plane right on time.” Loneliness has been such a deep-running recurrent theme in my life, from my early childhood when my parents split up and I was then separated from my alcoholic single mother when she became deathly ill, then shuffled between relatives until she recovered. The theme of loneliness recurred during my difficult tween years when I was ostracized and bullied and at times didn’t have a single friend in my entire school. To my days as a hopeful, melancholy, diffident college kid with social anxiety and a basket full of trauma. To my early 30’s, recovering in the hospital after losing my leg and nearly my life, and realizing how profoundly unhappy I was in an emotionally abusive marriage I’d never been able to break out of. “Here I am” the song goes….and yes, “here I am” so much happier than I ever was, thanking my lucky stars to have found a kind, sensitive, loving and caring partner who sees me for who I truly am. But, somehow, the bittersweet taste of loneliness is always on the back of my tongue, and I can never quite shake the feeling that I myself am “the only living boy in New York.”
I’ve been pushing myself so hard lately to do well in my classes and in my contract position. And I’m once again by myself back home, while my wife is still in India taking care of her grandmother. I’ve been feeling so lost, so isolated. “Wandering, I am lost…” This deeply moving song by Jimmy Cliff has been a staple in my “Getting Through” playlist, which I first put together during my very tough internship year. I used this song with a cancer patient who had had many ups and down and whose diagnosis was uncertain. This song really spoke to her, and to me, and seemed to create a shared space between us where we could be together, experiencing the pain and the joy of life. God knows I’ve been through a lot, but not what she has. I wonder where she is today, if she made it. My whole life I’ve felt as if I have many rivers to cross, and today is no exception, even though I am the happiest I’ve ever been and I have so much to be thankful for. Somehow, though, it seems there’s never time and space to rest. Always… one more river to cross. And so it goes…
This song also speaks to some deep-seated issues for me, particularly my history of great difficulty on going after the things that I want, often difficulty even in naming or knowing them. But walking through life feeling as I have nothing, and that whenever I do get something, I lose it or have it taken away from me. The pensive plaintive chord progression and vocals inspired me to let my brush gently wander and undulate across the page. Color seemed out of place here; this is a black-and-white feeling. In DBT they say “feelings aren’t facts,” but they do exist, and now this one is embodied in semi-permanent fashion in ink on paper.
I’m leaving India in a little over four days. I’m feeling so sad. I’ll miss my wife so much for the five weeks we’re apart. I’m also feeling terrified about starting my new music therapy contract, about whether I have what it takes, about working in-person for the first time since the pandemic started, about being able to complete all my work for my PhD. At the same time I feel excited about all the positive change. But those old self-negating voices keep surfacing, my history as a child of alcoholics, as sweet nerdy kid who was mercilessly bullied, as an emotionally abused spouse, as a cog in the wheel at a toxic, exploitative corporate jobs. All situations I’ve moved beyond, yet still carry with me. As I’ve been exploring the Enneagram this has resonated powerfully and often in a challenging, even disturbing way, opening old wounds. The song “Firework” by Katy Perry has been a touchstone of personal inspiration for me over the last 10 years. So much so I’ve even recorded my own version of it. The lyrics (below) speak openly and unflinchingly to these feelings of not being “enough,” of not having any worth, of fear, and shame, sadness and loss. But the chorus makes me looks straight at the truth of my unique value and beauty as a human being, how I have every right and every ability to shine my light into this world. This song brings me to tears, tears of self-love transcending deep-seated shame. It’s one of the most therapeutic songs in my extensive self-medication arsenal as a music therapist, and I am totally in love with the painting that came out of it.
This was a very interesting experiment technique-wise; I found myself naturally moving my brush in embodied expression of the music, both the literal rhythms but also in more interpretive expressions of the melody, harmonies, tonal color and the lyrics. I’m sure this is not an uncommon practice, but I basically discovered it for myself during this session, and I think it will prove to be an important part of my artistic process as both a musician and visual artist, as well as a therapist and scholar. Somehow, the live multi-modal expression process excites me far more than simply sitting down and focusing only on painting, and it’s very different from just having music on in the background while painting for “inspiration.”
After my wife’s grandmother had yet another blowup, and I was feeling profoundly put-upon in having to even do “another stupid painting” when I was feeling buried by my academic work and also stressed at the living situation and at seeing my partner subjected to such a challenging, abusive and explosive caregiving situation, one which triggered my own trauma around my narcissistic alcoholic mother. Rage in red and black was the result, and it’s actually one of my favorite of my paintings.
On February 1, the first day of the Year of the Tiger according to the Chinese calendar, there was a blowup between family members which for me, although only a bystander, felt quite triggering and activating. The house felt quite charged with “tiger energy.” I didn’t quite know what to do with it. I closed the door to the room I’m using as a makeshift study, office, and art studio, put on headphones, and blasted “Back In Black” by AC/DC. This seemed to help release some of the pent up energy. I then decided to paint. I decided to honor Chinese New Year by finding a playlist of Chinese classical music. I started the music and got out my painting supplies, deciding to go with black ink only. As the music played, I allowed the movements it inspired in my body to flow through my arm, through my fingers and into my brush. I found myself painting jagged lines that formed themselves into rocky, craggy mountains. The painting continued to almost make itself. At a certain point, I felt the mountains and rocks were “done,” and I, remembering the advice my classmate Tiffany had offered when we’d zoomed some time earlier, to utilize various shapes and not simply stick to lines, started to make dark clouds floating over the mountains. Once a few clouds were in place, I knew I had to paint some lightning. I used jagged lines that were somewhat similar to the lines making up the mountains, and so my lightning bolts blended into the landscape, the rocks. I finished the painting, photographed it, and shared the picture with my wife and her brother, who both loved it. In a remarkable synchronicity, just after that, a song that sounded extremely familiar came onto the Chinese classical playlist (which contains over 500 songs, playing randomly on “shuffle”). I almost instantly recognized it as the exact song and exact recording that my online painting instructor uses on his videos, entitled “Amazing Red Sun.” All in all a very interesting and meaningful experience, during which I seemed to discover way to work with intense emotion through visual art.
Yesterday, I decided to indulge and give expression to my inner voice without thinking about technique or subject. My only objective was to somehow contact the energy that the New York School of abstract expressionism seems to elicit in me. I found a Spotify playlist called “Jackson Pollock,” which really was just a bunch of 50s bebop, and started it at John Coltrane’s “My Favorite Things” and just began painting. My initial intention was to make an abstract painting, but as the music played, images of an idealized East Village that exists now only in my mind, if it ever did once exist in physical reality, kept coming into my head. I started with black ink, and began making lines, which began to take shape as buildings. I made strokes and held the brush as I’ve learned to do in traditional Chinese painting, but the landscape that took shape was New York all the way. I let go of inner judgments that what I was doing might look “childish” and really allowed the music, and the interior energy of “boho East Village painter” flow through me. I’m very happy with the end result; my wife was a bit surprised at the harshness she saw in it, and called it “gritty” which actually pleased me tremendously. Although it looks quite different, the impressionistic cityscape for me rather evokes the work of Romare Bearden. I’m still trying to figure out where I’m going, and why, but this direction feels right. As much as I yearn for soothing pastoral beauty, I also long for the hard, gritty, edgy urban intensity that surfaced in this painting. I’ll continue to work with this tension. It forms an interesting parallel with the tension I’m feeling between structure and formlessless in terms of technique and approach, in that here, I threw technique to the wind, but the subject matter itself was structured, meticulously constructed objects, namely buildings, street lights, fire escapes, water towers; whereas on the flipside I’ve been making paintings following the strictures of traditional technique but with subject matter that is itself free-flowing and natural, i.e. plants and flowers. The theme of liberation and freedom seems to be recurring to me, and while that has old and deep roots in my life, it most certainly feels connected to my recent interest in disability activism and research that is informed by it. Even the emergence of qualities I associate with Bearden, an African-American painter working in the troubled 20th century (as opposed to the troubled 21st century I suppose), feels connected, an expression of solidarity with other marginalized groups, and perhaps an echo of the fact that the unprecedented activity and visibility of the Black Lives Matter movement in 2020 was one of the forces that helped inspire me to become more involved in disability activism and in fact to apply to PhD programs with an intention to research disability issues within my own field.
The other day, after my instructor Henry suggested I was ready to move on from orchids to irises, I had quite the mishap with my paints. I had yet to open the tube of yellow, and feeling too lazy to dig around for a safety pin or needle in my grandmother-in-law’s apartment here in Hyderabad, India, I made a small hole with a ballpoint pen. I squeezed, and only a small amount of paint came out, so I squeezed harder…and the entire tube burst open, squirting yellow paint all over my shirt and pants, my paper, and for good measure sending a few small splatters onto the wall and shelves nearby. By some fantastic miracle, my computer, the curtains, and various other vulnerable objects were spared. But my painting time went down the drain, as I spent a good half hour trying to clean my clothes. I not only disrupted myself, but my wife, who had set aside time to do her own watercolor painting along with her mom. We then brought her brother into the mix, who came up from downstairs with some spot-cleaning powder, and eventually we got most of the paint out and soaked my clothes to handwash. My wife had already managed to finish her own watercolor painting for the most part while I was secretly trying to contain the disaster on my own. Coincidentally, she was herself painting blue flowers, which came out quite nicely. I was left feeling dejected and inadequate, looking at the high quality of work she was able to product with minimal experience and effort. Meanwhile, I felt constrained and oppressed by my dyspraxia, which naturally had a lot to do with how I ended up squirting paint all over myself. It brought back so many memories of feeling inadequate to basic tasks in childhood and adolescence, being made fun of for “screwing up” at kicking a soccer ball, or sewing, sawing or silk-screening (both shop and home ec were required, and I did equally terribly in both classes, an equal opportunity failure, or so it seemed to me.) I did manage to recover emotionally enough the next day that I did complete a painting of irises, one I’m quite fond of, although my technique still leaves much to be desired. It’s got me thinking about how “technique” itself as a concept is riddled with ableism. The United States in particular is characterized by an oppressive “can do” culture and toxic positivity. If you’re disabled, just try harder, and you can conform to the mainstream standards of technical excellence. I don’t think traditional Chinese culture has historically been more or less ableist than most other cultures, but certainly as much as any other. I remember being put off years ago reading how traditional Japanese Zen monastics emphasized the importance of sitting correctly, kneeling on a cushion, and I read an account of a westerner about how if you could not do the technique correctly due to disability, you were basically out of luck. On the other hand, another tendency in American culture, counter to the toxic “can-do” focus, has been to soften and alter and adapt techniques to make them more accessible to elders and disabled people, and this has been criticized by some as corrupting or watering down traditional techniques and thus worsening the impact of cultural appropriation. It’s certainly a complicated issue. But I see a key component of disability empowerment being the adaptation and repurposing of whatever works for you, because even today, much of the time, nobody else is going to do it for you. I believe a respectful attitude can remain even as we modify existing techniques and create new ones that are inspired by traditional techniques of other cultures. Acknowledgment of the source and respectful credit are necessary. And for me, my approach to painting is I think increasingly going to go down this path. I’ve been feeling highly constrained by continuing to overfocus on learning technique, and I realize if I remain stuck like this I’m not going to get anywhere with this project. Given the limited time and my intense resistance, the time is NOW to break out and express freely, drawing respectful inspiration from, and continuing to slowly learn from, traditional Chinese methods. My next painting will demonstrate this. In the meantime, here are my irises:
“Time keeps on slipping, slipping, slipping, into the future…I want to fly like an eagle.” – Steve Miller
Resuming practice of orchid leaves last week, I found myself frustrated with my lack of progress and perhaps backsliding, and I decided to add a bit of landscape in the background, going totally off of only work I’ve seen, without instruction. Somehow not entirely outside the box, as in this case I sought to imitate landscape paintings I’d seen, but not really “knowing what I’m doing.” I don’t mind the result at all. But what has happened to that swirling vortex of Pollock/De Kooning/Motherwell that’s brewing inside me? I’ll revisit shortly. How can I incorporate or integrate a Taoist sensibility and traditional Chinese technique and aesthetic with the studied rebellious abandon of the New York School. Why am I even doing this? Am I barking up the wrong tree? I can only keep moving forward (it beats standing still, which I’m too good at.) You wouldn’t drive a car on the highway after one lesson in the parking lot. But then, here, in this scenario, who gets hurt if I “crash”? Isn’t creating a sufficient sense of safety to be willing to “crash and burn” exactly what I’m trying to do here? And who knows what will rise from the ashes?
Today was a bit of a breakthrough. Fueled by my recent experiment with the Buddha Board, and with my newfound resolve, inspired by Pat Allen, to approach painting with an open mindset, giving voice to my inner aesthetic impulses with less restraint or concern about conformity or technique, I created my first painting that includes the use of color and a second (very fine) brush. I began painting orchid leaves and flowers in the traditional style I’ve been learning, but the painting soon took on a life of its own and became a bit more surreal, taking on the look of perhaps a mythical undersea landscape, with cool, gentle blues and greens complementing the blacks and grays. A sense of softly curving flow and wavelike, lateral undulation and sweeping upward movement pervades this painting. It seems to reach a place for me that captures some of the essences of both traditional Chinese painting and New York School abstract expressionism. It feels welcoming and nurturing to me, filled with innocence and hope.
