catharsis and, or as, art: how grief changed my relationship to art

[image description: an angsty 17-year-old Michelle sits with her paintings of her dad that depict the final stages of his illness with cancer]

In 2016, I lost my dad. He had been ill for many years with cancer, and passed away that August. Grief is a condition I think you live with forever, but your relationship with it changes over time. The grief I feel now is far from the grief I initially felt after his passing. It’s there – but it’s dulled perhaps from the passage of time: I miss my dad more than anything in the world, but the pain has become softer. It’s not lessened, but it’s lost its sharp edges. It doesn’t stab the way it used to, and it’s not so unbearably loud anymore. It’s a quiet sadness that I feel somewhat at peace with now. Truthfully, I think this peace might also have something to do with growing up and growing into it (grief and adolescent angst are not a good combination, sorry mum). 

How art helped me through the initial stages of my grief  

In the initial stages of my grief, the loudness of my loss was unbearable. Luckily, I found a space in which I could engage with and feel the fullness of my grief in a way that wasn’t entirely overwhelming – I painted my way through it. I have always loved art. I was an avid drawer as a kid, an almost-aspiring designer, and spent an outrageous amount of time curating my Tumblr feed between the ages of 12 and 15. And when my dad died, painting became the only space in which I felt like I could work through my loss without being entirely overwhelmed by what I felt. My paintings were of my dad and about my dad, which allowed me to face my dad’s passing and not disassociate from it, but while meditatively directing my focus onto the content paintings itself: the colours, the brushstrokes, the movement. Looking back, I can’t imagine how I would have gotten through those initial months without it, and I’m somewhat proud of myself for it, because I think it was one of the most emotionally productive and cathartic ways I could have dealt with it. 

How grief complicated my relationship with art  

However, in turning my grief into art, what I didn’t anticipate at the time was that, once I had finished my paintings and felt ready to put the brush down, art became somewhat untouchable to me. I took what I thought was a short break from art, a necessary pause to allow myself to breathe out, to take a step forward away from those bleak first few months. But, some months later, when I eventually wanted to come back to it, there seemed to be a huge emotional barrier that I couldn’t cross. Picking up the brush again felt heavy, emotionally weighed down by the way in which my art – the very thing that had gotten me through the most volatile stages of my grief – had become irreversibly tied to my loss. It felt like an injustice to return to the brush, like a type of sacrilege, since I had sanctified my art as a tribute to my father.  

Soon after, I went off to university and began to channel all my energy into academic excellence. My dad was a professor and had worked through the initial years of his cancer to make sure my sister and I would have enough money for our ludicrous international tuition fees. I became obsessively fixated on trying to make his sacrifice worth it. So, my inability to return to art slipped into the background for a while. But slowly, over the last few years, I’ve longed to have my outlet back. I’ve attempted many times to paint again, with each attempt ending in nothing more than an overflowing waste-paper bin of barely-touched pieces of paper; white scrunched-up balls taunting me beside my desk. Friends would ask why I had stopped making art, and I would sheepishly reply something about being too busy. One day, one of my friends chimed in that ‘Michelle never does the things she’s good at.’ I grew frustrated with myself. I’d been making progress with my grief, why didn’t my art follow? 

Finding peace in stasis: Art as catharsis from trauma, and art becoming trauma 

 I would like to say that I’ve overcome my emotional block with painting and have a thriving Instagram account dedicated to it. But truthfully, there’s been little progress. I have, however, accepted that painting may not be something I can ever fully touch again – and that’s okay. The tension between art as catharsis from trauma, and art becoming trauma, is messy. I might not ever be able to disentangle them, but I think its important to find peace in this too – using painting to process the initial stages of my grief was worthy, and that’s enough. With this acceptance, I’ve been able to find other ways to engage with art; I’ve begun to write, to express myself in new ways, and I’ve joined an amazing team at Mxogyny (cheeky shoutout!) where I can engage with powerful creatives on a daily basis. So, maybe painting will remain for me in the depths of grief, tied to my father’s passing. But looking forward, I know my dad will continue to inspire me in any work that I do, within or outwith my grief. 

[image description: photo taken from behind, of Michelle painting a portrait of her dad during his final days]

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Michelle Moira Mei Ling Firth is a writer and creative who is passionate about the arts as a mode of expressing shared experience and empathy. She is currently reading Social Anthropology at the University in Edinburgh. You can find her through Instagram at michelle.moira.