Episode 30: Making Space For All Of Our Feelings with Marabeth Quin
Marabeth Quin is a talented artist and musician who, after a 35-year career in music, decided to explore her creative potential as a painter. Initially, she felt terrified and ashamed of pursuing this new passion, but the urge was too strong to ignore. Marabeth taught herself how to paint and dedicated 10 years to perfecting her skills before launching her art career in 2007. Despite having no business skills, she old some of her work and did commissions for about five years until her daughter had a massive stroke. Caring for her daughter took all of Marabeth's energy and focus, leaving her with little time for painting. It's only in the past year that she has been able to fully devote herself to her art career once again. She's now excited about the future and looking to expand her skills in licensing, surface pattern design, and Adobe Illustrator. In this episode, she openly shares about how she began to process all of her feelings related to her daughter’s stroke and how art has been a healing experience for her.
Art Can Be Our Teacher
Marabeth shares her journey of discovering her interest in collage art and how it helped her process her grief over her daughter's stroke. She initially struggled to incorporate collage into her art but eventually found that it allowed her to work through her emotions in a tangible way. She had been in survival mode for a long time, shelving her grief and relying on hope and denial to cope. However, she eventually hit a wall and realized that she needed to grieve and process her emotions. This was a scary and difficult process, but she found that collaging helped her symbolize and work through her emotions. She used tissue paper and mulberry paper to create layers of cohesion and beauty, and she found that this mirrored the process of life itself. She believes that art teaches us important lessons about the process of life and how to navigate it. Art can be a powerful teacher, if we intentionally take the time to “listen.”
Patience in the Process
One significant lesson that she has gained from collaging is the importance of patience and the process. She compares this to her daughter's recovery from a brain injury, stating that change takes time and repetition. She emphasizes that rushing the process with a lot of information does not stick and does not lead to long-term results. Marabeth has learned to approach her artwork with the same mindset, recognizing that it takes time and practice to achieve the desired outcome. She also acknowledges that emotions can sometimes impede the process and that sticking with it is essential. Marabeth shares that she used to struggle with calling a painting done even if she did not like it. However, collage has taught her to keep working and layering until she achieves the desired result. Through her artwork, Marabeth has developed the skill of persistence, and helped her learn that sticking with a process and having patience can lead to significant growth and success.
Feeling and Processing All of Our Emotions
Marabeth believes that people often suppress their emotions because they think in a binary way, feeling either happy or sad, instead of acknowledging the complexity of their emotions. Additionally, they may focus on productive emotions, ignoring other feelings that need to be processed. Finally, people often believe that it's not normal to feel a certain way, which can prevent them from accepting and processing their emotions. She believes that accepting and making room for all emotions, even if uncomfortable, is important for personal growth and artistic expression. By acknowledging and processing all emotions, people can better understand themselves and create authentic art.
Marabeth shares several tools that have helped her process her emotions. One of her primary tools is art, which she finds saves her life over and over again. She also emphasizes the importance of moving and taking long walks every day, which she sees as a form of exercise and an opportunity for processing her emotions. It is also important to normalize all emotions and understanding that they are not a judgment on our character. Marabeth has also learned that she can choose her thoughts, which was a game changer for her. She does a lot of reading and talks to her best friend about her emotions. She believes that by sharing them, they will no longer exist in secret, and she can work with them. Finally, Marabeth uses a metaphor to describe how she manages her emotions, imagining herself as a room and pushing the walls out a little bit when she feels emotionally stopped up. This simple exercise helps her regulate her stress and regain control. Overall, Marabeth's tools emphasize the importance of self-compassion, normalizing emotions, and understanding that emotions provide important information about our lives.
Key Takeaways:
No matter how long it has taken to get to where you are, it is never too late to start.
Processing our feelings and allowing ourselves to feel everything: anger, grief, frustration…is what allows us to heal.
Having emotions is a normal human experience. Our emotions are complex, and we can often feel two things at one time.
Art is an incredible teacher if you are willing to slow down and listen.
Just like in our life circumstances, art takes patience and reworking until we arrive with a result we are satisfied with. Stick with the piece you are working on and don’t quit, Rework it until you love it.
We can trap ourselves into thinking we don’t have options and believing everything that we think. There is power in remembering that we can choose our thoughts and we can choose to look at the options available to us.
Some tools to help process our emotions are:
-Creating art
-Moving our bodies
-Remembering that our feelings are not a judgment of our character, and that are feelings are simply giving us information.-Telling a person that you trust what you are feeling, especially feelings that we want to hide or are ashamed of.
-Imagine yourself as a room and pushing out the walls a little bit to change the square footage to give yourself space for all of your feelings.
-Remembering that you have the ability change your thought process and patterns.
“I paint because the process requires things from me that are what I want most to be. Learning to let go and listen deeply to my creative impulse is how I want to live.”Self-taught artist Marabeth Quin has been working in the arts in Nashville, TN for over 35 years. It was music that originally brought her to Nashville as a professional studio vocalist in 1987 and gave her a decades long career singing for people like Martina McBride, Garth Brooks, and Vince Gill. In 2007 she expanded her artistic endeavors into painting when she began selling her colorful works of art. Now with art collectors spanning the globe, she continues to explore a wide variety of subject matter, materials, and platforms, never really satiating her fascination with art’s instructive influence in shaping her spirit. When Marabeth paints, she sees it as a sort of meditative process in which she can notice the impulse to control, to dictate, or to have an agenda, and she uses this information as an opportunity to let go. These cues gently redirect her thoughts and aims to that of simply loving and honoring the work and being a co-creator, not a dictator.
“This is what I adore about art--it is a sometimes blunt and uncompromising teacher, yet it never fails to consistently show up, demanding my presence, and devotedly pointing me in the right direction, with my open heart leading the way. Painting has always been a teacher to me, and that life instruction continues to be one of its most alluring qualities because, above all else, painting teaches me about life and how to live it fully.”
Website: www.marabethquinart.comIG: @marabethquin
YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCEfiZZIOS9G-gGHZ1ps1OJg
Freebie “Normalize the Messy Creative Journey” https://mailchi.mp/71b22b2876a7/normalizing-the-messy-creative-process
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