Nina Ross, PhD

This fall, I approached an intuitive painting class with some trepidation. After laboring over the first painting I presented my work to one of my mentors, an art therapist, for comment. She asked me what I felt it needed. I was blank. We turned it up-side-down. Again I was blank. She then asked if the image was precious and I replied that it did feel that way. At that point she suggested I paint over the image and keep working. For a moment, I froze. It’s not that the painting was good—it was that I was afraid I couldn’t do better or even more. I was amazed that I actually had to draw on some courage to proceed and yet I knew if I did it would be a breakthrough for me. I remembered seeing Henri-Georges Clouzot’s 1956 film, The Mystery of Picasso (Le Mystère Picasso), which shows Picasso painting and repainting image after image. Out of the hundreds of reworks there were probably innumerable masterpieces that were simply painted over. He seems to be playing with all the possibilities–to let go of the ‘preciousness’ in any one particular image and keep exploring until the image that speaks to him emerges. This memory opened the way to proceed so I grabbed a large brush and began to apply large swaths of paint to the paper. What emerged and morphed from one painting into another were a series of exploding volcanoes. I painted the molten veins beneath the volcano, I expanded the explosion onto another sheet of paper, added a starry night, some lightening, a trickster coyote, a tree with its roots deep in the dark earth, which finally became a woman’s back with her spine exposed. Upon stepping back from this series I understood most of the symbolism but I realized I had only scratched the surface when a friend commented that the explosions looked like pain. I was thinking emotional pain but he had meant physical pain. Then it hit me that I had been painting the chronic shoulder pain I’ve been experiencing since an accident last winter. I’ll be working with these particular images for some time to come yet I am willing to let them become something else.