Boldly Living Between the Lines
Exploring isolation with Piet Mondrian and Narrative Medicine
It was a pleasure to welcome the 15+ people that joined us in our cozy-feeling online workshop. We came together, as usual, from across the globe, with a mix of experienced workshop participants and new faces.
We selected the text for this workshop to explore the experience we are having globally of isolation and confinement. Our text was Piet Mondrian’s Composition with Yellow, Blue and Red 1937–42.
Our writing prompt for the session was: “What lives between the lines”.
Abstract art pushes us to ask questions of the text that bring human experience to the composition. The lines between the artwork and the observer become blurred, as we focussed our unique vantage point into the act of looking closely at the text, and where it takes us.
Mondrian himself felt that this art reflected a greater, universal truth beyond everyday appearance, with the restriction in form to straight line, vertical and horizontal orientations and primary colors only.
In our group discussion, we found many humanizing elements that reflected the collective experiences of our current moment in time.
In one person’s view, the black lines formed a map and reminded the looker of travel and navigation. The map seemed to be a fragment of a whole, zoomed in to where is only showed a fraction of a location, but close enough to envisage the white spaces between as skyscrapers. The text brought the perspective of an observer, looking from the outside to see where they might travel next.
For another, the lines became bars that restricted free movement, viewed from within and unable to escape. The image became a visual metaphor for being trapped, with the block of yellow a reminder that even within this space, the sun still shines, undeterred.
Although this piece is fiercely geometric, there is movement and inconsistency that was reminiscent of nature. The lines and intersections seem to move and change based upon the direction they are viewed, even reminding one participant of trees moving in the wind.
As we spent more time with the image, the seemingly empty spaces between the lines gained prominence. Viewed as empty spaces on a work calendar, they became a reminder of the day to day changes in work and life that people are experiencing. The more time we spent with the spaces, the more we wondered what we should “do” with them, and with the wide expanses of time we find unfilled with the usual minutiae of life. Together we examined the way time moves through this painting, “filled with space, hope and the potential for action”.
As a group, we each wrote for five minutes responding to the prompt “what lives between the lines”.
In sharing the writing that was produced, we sensed the way that pooling our observations had created a collective sense of what the painting meant to us, and we were all writing in the same shadow of space and possibility.
One participant left us with a line to ponder as we navigate our white spaces and black lines of life. In his writing, he shared that “the person that lives between the lines has the possibility to get the freedom they deserve”, and that to continue to strive to reach the colors that occupy small parts of the whole is a worthwhile occupation for a lifetime.
If you participated in the workshop, please feel free to share what you wrote below in the comments below. Remember this is a public space where confidentiality is not assured.
These writings will give you a taste of what can be created in just 5 minutes, and how we share in these workshops.
We’re running an online Narrative Medicine workshop series, starting on Monday 4th May 2020, to continue the work of close reading and creative writing that builds essential skills for humane health care.
People that attend our courses are health professionals approaching their work from a curious and creative angle, and understand that stories are a fundamental component of evidence-based care.
This course is run asynchronously, studying a text and writing together over a week, rather than the one hour we spent in “real time” in the Zoom call.
Find out more at narrativerx.com and join our facebook group to join the discussion.
