Art Journalling For Success - stop sabotaging, start scribbling

Forget about discovering other people’s secrets journals can reveal ourselves to ourselves - used effectively your art journal could help you bridge the gap from aspiration to manifestation.

Writer and essayist Joan Didion once wrote:

“I don’t know what I think until I write it down.”

Which is one reason why keeping a written journal can be so revelatory. Yet, as I’ve mentioned in my introductory post on art journalling an art journal can do that too, only through the use of images, symbols, patterns, and more.

So how can a little old art journal help take your goals from wishes to wins?

Let me tell you a wee story about a glittery-green-eyed guy…

When vision boards don’t work

Some years ago, after my marriage ended, I found myself in a quandary. I was deep in a relationship rabbithole with a glittery-green-eyed guy. By day I was employed at soul-sapping central. By night I was living with a group of thirty-somethings carrying on like students. The rocky relationship seemed like my only safe haven.

This wasn’t the way I wanted things. I felt powerless and alone - even in the relationship. So, on one of our ‘breaks’ I attempted to regain some semblance of order by piecing together the flotsam and jetsam that had once been my aspirations by creating a vision board.

As neuroscientist Tara Swart says of vision (or action) boards:

“It is a way of aligning your deep subconscious and conscious brain, so that you can stop wasting energy on priorities that are at odds with the things that you really want, deep down.”

Central to that vision was a healthy relationship, inspiring work, and a place I could call home. Yet, just as I was feeling galvanised glittery-green-eyed guy was back. Poof! Just like that, there I was lounging in the land of the lotus-eaters, where taking action on any of my aspirations - which, to be frank, was a little bit scary - seemed. So. Over. Whelm. Ing.

“Problem is, a vision board which is all style no action is just a collage. ”

And so, my carefully cut-out desires crumpled under the weight of my cold-shoulder.

Art journal your adventure

While you may not be sabotaging your goals by getting distracted by glittery-green-eyed guys, most of us will concede that navigating the uncharted gap between where-you-are-now and ideal-future-you has its inevitable ups and downs.

It’s too easy to get all enthused by glossy magazines urging you to claim your golden future, only to find yourself teetering on the edge of an unfathomable abyss. Then your inner critic chimes in.

What the hell were you were thinking, anyway? Yesterday you were bursting with confidence and self belief. Today you’re harangued by the harpies of self doubt. But why? How come you leapfrog one setback only to be floored by another?

That’s where your art journal comes in to play.

While it isn’t so much a bridge from dream to destination, your journal can become a kind of travel guide. The signs and symbols you discover as you play in your book can help you clarify your desires, and reveal the weird and wonderful things which are holding you back.

As Tara Swart explains in The Source: open your mind, change your life, keeping a (written) journal is an essential component of her goal-attaining technique and helped her uncover her relationship with relationships:

“I found my journalling a powerful way to see that mistrust was leading me into repeated patterns of holding back from or avoiding intimacy that inevitably led to self-fulfilling prophecies.”

A useful insight, eh?

Self reflective art journal prompts

So, how can you use your art journal to help you keep on choosing your own adventure?

• Create one portrait of where you are now and another of where you want to be in a year or so (you could start with a photo) - try Pinterest or Instagram for inspiration

• Explore your inner critic - what does it look like / say / do?

• Make a map of the places, people and things that uplift you and another of those that pull you down - check out Grayson Perry’s maps on Google images

• Feeling stuck? Ask what would 7 year old you do - get in the flow and use colour, symbol and pattern to reveal the answer

• Find a favourite quote and illustrate it - see Pinterest for some prompts

• Start with a Rorshach inkblot and see where it leads - like here, for example...

• Create an abstract image detailing what wellbeing looks and feels like to you - again Pinterest and Instagram can provide much inspiration

• Plus, check out Journaling.com for podcasts and articles on keeping a written and art journal for wellbeing

Wishing you a rich and revelatory art journal journey. Say ‘hi’ to me on Instagram (sometimes Facebook) where I’ll be sharing more creative inspiration and details of upcoming events in London or Essex areas.

Red Shoes - power, magic and stepping up

Once the preserve of the powerful, red shoes captured hearts and minds for centuries. But Hans Christian Andersen’s fairytale distilled this obsession into something far more potent. Because red shoes got personal…

There’s a line in the film Chocolat where Juliette Binoche’s frustrated daughter admonishes her:

“Why can’t you wear black shoes like the other mothers?!”

Because, of course, this witchy woman who’s come to town to shake up the strict moral codes with her seductive and ever-so-slightly-magical chocolate shop does it wearing red shoes.

Luck & Power

Red shoes are powerful. In China, for example, red shoes were often considered to be “full of lucky” as Eddie Izzard might say. Which is why in some traditions a bride’s red shoes were tossed from the roof to ensure marital fortune.

But, in the west red shoes have traditionally been the preserve of popes and royalty. As the “online cabinet of curiosities” that is Messy Nessy Chic says:

“The [red] shoes’ origins go back to Byzantine days, when they were donned by Norman kings as symbols of bloody martyrdom. Their successors, the Roman Emperors, stuck with it – in fact, they became a standard high-fashion accessory for aristocrats. If your shoes were red, you were a somebody.”

So, when an ordinary woman - a woman of no public standing - wore red shoes there was trouble.

Overstepping the Mark

In 1845 Hans Christian Andersen came along with his foreboding footwear-focused fairytale The Red Shoes, a story about a girl, plucked from poverty by a rich old lady, who dares to wear red shoes to her confirmation:

“Everyone looked at her feet, and ... it seemed to her that even the old pictures of the funerals, those portraits of vicars and their wives with stiff collars and long black robes, fixed their eyes on her red shoes, and these were all she thought of when the vicar placed his hand on her head and spoke of holy baptism, of the covenant with God and that she was now going to be a grown-up Christian person... but all Karen could think of was her red shoes.”

Of course, it doesn’t turn out well. Karen has overstepped the mark in her beloved red shoes. And, so she is punished. Cursed to dance to her death - always good to know where you stand, eh?!.

Unsurprisingly, this story has inspired many a feminist conversation. Why is Karen’s choice of footwear so troublesome? Pride? Vanity? Excessive aspirations? Sexual explicitness? Well, what many forget is that The Red Shoes actually features not one, but three pairs of red shoes - and not all of them are cursed.

Three Red Shoes

First, there are the handmade red shoes made from scraps of fabric given to the poor, bare-footed Karen by Mother Shoemaker, a village elder. So when Karen’s mother dies what does she wear? Well, the red shoes, naturally. The only pair she owns. 

In contrast, the second pair of red shoes belong to a princess, no less. Now living with the wealthy old lady, Karen has been forced to cast aside her crudely-made red shoes - shoes she believed to be magic due to her stroke of good fortune. Now she’s learning what it means to be good and proper. And yet:

“Nothing in the world, though, could compare with red shoes!”

So, when she spies the third and final pair in the shoemakers, she’s a gonna. A dead ringer for the princess’s pumps, these red shoes were meant for a Count’s daughter. So Karen’s ultimate sin, it seems, is her desire to step above starchy middle class respectability and into the lap of aristocratic luxury - she is literally walking in someone else’s shoes.

What Do You Stand For?

In real life, just as in the story, Andersen’s red shoes have taken on a life of their own. Probably most famously there is the 1948 Powell & Pressburger film about a ballerina (Moira Shearer) torn between love and art.

Then there is Kate Bush’s 1993 album, The Red Shoes, which expands on the film and puts a very Kate Bush spin on things. As Hilary Davidson writes in her paper, Sex & Sin: The Magic of Red Shoes, Bush:

“ [U]ses the red shoe motif to trace a journey through feminine emotional experience, losing and regaining love, passion and a sense of self.”

So, as women have become increasingly emancipated it appears the story of The Red Shoes has evolved with them. No longer simply footwear, the red shoes seem to have become symbolic of our own agency, or lack thereof. As Jungian analyst Clarissa Pinkola Estes writes in Women Who Run With The Wolves:

“[W]e may travel life’s path in one of two ways: in hand-made shoes — crafted with love and care according to the unique needs of the individual soul; or in red shoes — initially promising instant fulfillment, but ultimately leading to a hollow, painful, split existence.”

Your Red Shoes

So if, as the Jungian analyst tells us, shoes are symbolic of what you stand for, what do your red shoes represent? Are they red shoes of your own design? Or are you squeezing your feet into someone else’s shoes, and being led a merry dance?