Art for Family Resilience
When my daughter was three, she started experiencing haunting nightmares. She became anxious, tired, unsettled, and frustrated. I sat on the floor with her and asked her to tell me about the bad dreams. She described monsters with teeth that were after her. I had no idea what caused these dreams, nor did she. We had no way of untangling the source of the trouble.
So I suggested that we try to make a painting together so that we could see what these monsters look like. I bought a canvas and acrylic paints at the art store, and we sat down on the floor again together. I asked her to tell me what the place looked like where these monsters appeared. She described a swirling, dark, chaotic place. I dipped my fingers in a deep purple and started making strokes on the canvas.
“Like this?” I asked.
She said, “Yes, but bigger, stronger.”
I dipped my fingers in the dark blue and made a few more strokes.
“Is it like this?”
“Sort of,” she said.
“Show me,” I said.
She dipped her fingers in the dark colors and began to paint heavy curves, like a storm approaching.
“That’s what it felt like?”
She nodded.
“Yeah, that does feel scary.”
We rubbed dark paint all over the canvas. “And how about the monsters? How many of them do you see in these dreams?” I asked.
“One big one and two smaller ones.”
I handed her a brush. “Show me.”
She dipped the brush into a crimson red and made a circle near the top of the canvas, and she filled it in with orange slurries with purple. Then she made two more smears a little lower down.
“What do their faces look like?” I asked.
“Big yellow teeth,” she said without hesitation.
I smiled. “Show me.”
She dipped the brush into bright yellow and added pointy triangle shapes to the circular swirls. “They’re really scary,” she said.
“I’m feeling scared just looking at those big teeth. Those are some mean monsters!”
She nodded and kept painting. I watched her for a few minutes while she made each monster face more and more terrifying. Then she put down the brush and looked at them.
“Do they have horns or warts or disgusting drool?”
She shook her head no. “Just big teeth.”
“And big eyes maybe?”
She smiled, picked up the brush again and added bright yellow eyes to each monster.
“Wow, good job making them look so scary!”
She nodded and smiled at her accomplishment.
“You know, to me they also look pretty silly now with those big eyes and teeth. They kinda look like cartoon monsters.”
She stared at the canvas for a moment and nodded.
“Do they have tongues?”
She nodded, added big red tongues to each monster. “They look really funny now, Daddy.”
I picked up a brush and added bright pink dots to the tongues. She added some spiky blue hair.
We smiled at our work, at each other. “They do look pretty funny, don’t they?” I held up the canvas at arm’s length and showed her.
“Yeah, they’re not scary anymore.”
And her monster nightmares never returned.
_________
That was twenty years ago. In the intervening years, art became a central bonding activity in our family as we processed our ups and downs. So much so that our dining room table now resembles more of a canvas itself, covered with ink, paint, glitter, glue, charcoal, pigment, and so forth. I keep a huge stash of art supplies in a cabinet in the dining room. Sometimes we throw a table cloth over it when guests come over for dinner, but otherwise we leave it stained with the years of all the fun art we’ve made together. More than therapeutic, art is a constant activity in our household. Both of my children now have an eye for color, texture, shape, movement, and composition, and they often start painting just to enjoy the sensations. No goals, no standards, no rules, no judgements. Just the expressive, self-healing nature of the imagination at work.
Yesterday for Father’s Day, my daughter gifted me a fresh wood canvas. She wanted the four of us to spend the evening making a painting together. We had a lovely time.
