A journey through the therapy looking glass

Art felt thanks

As a passive observer, I’ve always been fond of art. As someone who draws like a five year old, I’ve also been slightly envious of people who have artistic talent. A couple of years ago, at the start of this lockdown, I decided to do something about this, and so set about using all those lockdown hours to see if I could learn how to paint. 

We are incredibly lucky, here at Grendon, in that we have the support and engagement provided by Dean, our Artist in Residence, and James, a Producer from Ikon Gallery, in Birmingham. Organised by Ikon Gallery and funded by the Marie-Louise von Motesiczky Charitable Trust, they are able to regularly supply us with all manner of art materials to use as we wish. More than that though, they are available to support us in our creative endeavours. Thanks to their generous support and resources, along with a thousand hours of frustrated practice in my cell, I can now paint to a reasonable standard.

My best work, technically, are the paintings I’ve done from magazine images. I suppose they are quite impressive but, really, what’s the point in them? Don’t get me wrong, there is much value in the act of doing the work, as you get that sensation psychologists call ‘flow’ – when you’re in the moment and the world around you disappears. When the world around you is a prison cell, this is especially valuable. 

The thing is though, engaging in therapy largely consists of committing to doing differently that you have so far done in life. For me, this means committing to feeling my way through life and not just thinking my way through it: matters of the heart, not the head. I’ve always been good at learning new skills and working cerebrally, but never any good at connecting with these things – or indeed anything or anybody – on a purely emotional level. So, for me to really gain from doing art, I need it to involve something more emotional and enriching than simply recreating one image from another. 

It is said – by people who often say these sorts of things – that you can’t have a proper relationship with anyone else until you first learn to have one with yourself. When this has been said to me in the past, I have nodded politely, while secretly thinking ‘please stop talking!’ I now realise that I thought this way because, subconsciously, I knew it to be true but did not know how to begin that process. I have, previously, always felt somehow disconnected from the ground I’m on, or to anyone else around me; my mind always occupied by what comes next and never what’s happening now. This way of being had seen me float from one disaster to the next, without ever knowing how to ‘land’ and take stock. 

As it turns out, art offers the perfect conduit for accessing our inner world and, subsequently, connecting with it. My conversations with our Artist in Residence, and my fellow artists who reside here, have been invaluable in helping me realise that art and creativity is not so much about making valuable use of time as it is about making all time valuable. 

I had the misconception that an artistic life involved a whole heap of daydreaming and aimlessness. I now realise that, on the contrary, it involves great swathes of attention to life itself and, as a by-product, the role we play in it. I for one am sick of feeling like a passive observer of my own tumultuous existence. I want to feel connected. I want to have a relationship with the world around me, and now recognise that the only way of doing that is to first connect with my internal world.

Many of us carry emotional pain that we suppress to such a point that its origins become shrouded and unidentifiable. Anything that allows us to bring that pain into the light can only be a good thing. I think that, ultimately, the reward for paying attention is always healing. 

I’m not suggesting for a moment that, in and of itself, taking up a creative endeavour will magically remedy all manner of neuroticism. As we all learn in therapy, there are no one solution answers or ‘cures’ for our multiple maledictions. We are all different and must all, within a wide therapeutic framework, find what works for us. 

Many people think that coming to a place like Grendon primarily involves group work and, of course, this is a large part of it. However, this place isn’t a guided programme with a fixed, prescribed pathway for each individual: we have to be the designers and developers of our own recovery; we have to engage with any opportunity to try new ways of being us. 

I have spoken often and loudly about all the things we have lost here this past couple of years. However, although our access to the Artist in Residence has been invariably curtailed over this time, he has still found a way to keep engaged and to bring to us the healing power of art and creativity. For the efforts of both Dean and James, amongst many, I am eternally grateful to them both. 

Nick London, a nom de plume, is resident at HMP Grendon