#36 – Souffrance
January 2016
Acrylic on canvas (1m x 1m)
„Souffrance“ („Suffering“) is another painting that helped me access some deep emotions and make truly visible that not everything in my life was light and love but also darkness and pain.
I avoided feeling a lot of my own pain for a long time and kept „busy“ instead, trying to keep appearances together, holding tight to things like a failing relationship/marriage (between 1995 and 2006) and trying to reassure myself that I was ok, for example when I was having a tough time with motherhood (just after my daughter was born in 2010 or when I was self-harming in 2014).
In 2015, after a short therapy where I had realised how deeply engrained my patterns were, my heart was cracking open more and more easily when I saw the suffering of families, victims of attacks and terrorism, everywhere in zones of conflict, from the horrors of Aleppo to the terrorist attacks in my home country, France.
Instead of holding back my feelings of overwhelm and my helplessness when seeing this suffering, I felt the need, the urge to paint all of that was coming up. Through painting I felt more able to express the pain that I was sharing with them, in my own way, in a language that could not convey the emotions that I was trying to express and process: through painting.
This is how Souffrance was born. I shed many tears and felt both my rage and helplessness at the violence in this world. My hand grabbed the red and the black paint and I ended up throwing them on the canvas, feeling the deepest pain as the paint hit the canvas and releasing the tension at the same time. It was very cathartic.
The red felt like the blood shed by innocent victims and the black was like a veil of bereavement. For the first time, I left the painting in a very raw state, only partially covering the cotton canvas. And that felt right to me, a true expression of how raw and heartbroken I had been feeling.
My dear friend Armelle chose Souffrance amongst a whole lot of them when she came to visit. I was very touched to hear that it felt very special for her. I let this painting go to her home, knowing that it would be in a safe place there. Armelle has seen me in some of my darkest hours. Since we’Ve known each other, she’s always had this amazing capacity to hold space for pain with open arms, allowing those who suffer to process it as they need to. I‘m grateful for our friendship of 28 years.
Allowing myself to paint Souffrance has been deeply healing for me, because I‘ve been able to translate on the canvas the landscape of my soul (what I was feeling when I was painting it), without trying to „beautify“ it, to make it less than it was. I felt a sense of inner peace once it was done, having let the emotions and turmoil from my soul out on the canvas. When I look at it now, I accept that deep emotions need to be felt, that the Darkness should be brought to Light, that it‘s a part of us, that only by looking at it for what it is, can we accept who we are, leading us to eventually feel compassion towards our suffering and the suffering of others, a first step to healing our humanity.
#36 – Souffrance – Detail
Black and red layers
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