Personal Revelations

To discover more about yourself, pick up a brush and visit your nearest canvas. Some people choose therapy. Some people roam the world trying to find their "self." But, using art to work through self exploration is much more effective.

A reflection of you and your thoughts, art is like a mirror. You hold it up and take a good look at yourself. Only it's all on canvas. What it reveals is how you see yourself, how you see the world, and how you see life. Everything you think is in images in your brain. When you least expect it, these thoughts bleed to the canvas where you can see them for yourself.

If you have negative thoughts about the world, your artwork might come out a little on the dark side. You might be caught up in scenes of war. You might catch the sadness in a person's eye. Paintings of days might be stormy, rainy, or just a little gray. Your thoughts encompass what comes out of your artistic expression and you'd be surprised what you are thinking.

When life is great and you have no complaints, your artwork would probably be more positive. Sunny days and beautiful streams are more likely to be your landscapes. Smiling faces and kids playing have become your portraits. Your scenes no longer catch images of war, they might be of softball games in the community park or guys pushing girls on swing sets. Your thoughts still encompass your artistic expression, only you live on the lighter side of life now.

It's not always so simple, but that's pretty much how it works. When you look at your artwork, you have a chance to see what you are all about. What's going on in your mind? What are your thoughts portraying?

Abstracts also reveal your thoughts in some way. To make this simple, let's just use space as the explanation. Abstracts that are spatial might have organized objects or disorganized objects. It might be a far stretch of the imagination, but a painting with scattered objects that have no order might reveal a mind stuck on negative thoughts. A sense of order is positive. Of course, an artist at play might have fun arranging objects in a haphazard order. That's where interpretation plays a major part in understanding art.

You can't learn everything from one piece of artwork. But if you stop to reflect on your work, you can begin to put together a complex network of thoughts. And sometimes, you won't even to have to put it all together. You'll see the pattern and know exactly what you have been thinking or where you are in this world.

Therapy can help you discover yourself, thousands of dollars later. Roaming the world can give you a good start, but you'll never get half as close until you come back home. If you really think you need some kind of center, some idea of who you really are, it would save you a world of trouble if you just started to express yourself from inside out through art.