An artwork a day...

The 365 day mood project

Source: R. Gillmann

The 365 day mood project was a personal creative journey to explore my intuitive painting style and see how intuitively I can produce art each day of the year, with the rigid intend to express my emotions out on paper for a 15 minute timeframe, using postcard size paper and a small selection of art materials.

This daily exercise of emotional creative expression served as a form of strengthening my intuition and creative emotional self-exploration, with the aim to enhance self-awareness and how I can express this creatively through the use of art. Creating an artwork each day, became my daily practice, which was only possible by building a routine to create the drawings.

Each session started with about two to three minutes of mindfulness exercise. This, consisted of deep and focused breathing, following the breath, tuning in to myself and intently asking myself: "how do I feel right now?". Then, I waited for whatever images, feelings, emotions, colours, forms, or impulses came up.

The next step pf the exercise was to focus on what material I needed to use to express this in the best possible way. Listening to my intuition, I then began the art process, focusing on how I felt, the impulse to create, and what form and image started to reveal itself on paper.

The artworks were not created with the intend to attain a professional standard - instead the focus lay in the process of the emotional translation into form, flow, colour, energy exertion, quality of materials, haptic involvement, and creative expression.

Source: R. Gillmann

Objective:

The objective of creating these mood pictures was to dedicate a time frame of no more than 15 minutes, with the purpose to keep the expression as intuitive and authentic as possible. Through this, my heart had the opportunity to speak before my mind could interfere with censorship or evaluation. My aim was to strengthen and increase my awareness to my emotions and acknowledge these as valuable guides in my life and to explore art making as a language for emotional translation. 

Outcome:

Creating one mood picture a day allows one to connect with the inner state of being and strengthens the ability to translate mood into the language of creative expression. Following this routine and daily practise, revealed itself as challenging at times however. I discovered that we often do not have certain verbal expressions to pinpoint how we feel, or are able to define exactly how we feel, let alone how we should convey this feeling.

It was not an easy practice to follow through. With daily demands, especially time pressures, work, family and lifestyle needs seeking priority over creating art, I struggled to produce even a small artwork in some days. But I managed! With dedication and determination, making it my daily practice, I produced 365 drawings. My felt sense of where I was and how I felt at that particular moment increased, my self-awareness and tuning into myself, my intuition to my 'gut-feeling' as well as being mindful to myself at the present moment, heightened and strengthened over time. Over time, I was faster to focus on how I feel and react internally, I was more in-tune with myself and developed an easy and gentle tool for emotional expression - readily accessible and powerful, to regain the emotional balance / homeostasis, for the day.