Emotion Is Not the Subject. It Is the Method.

Today I was thinking about my practice. About how I bring my entire self into the studio, not just the creative sense but the spiritual, the logical, the emotional. All of it together.

When I began studying Human Design and learned about my own emotional wave, part of me thought how wonderful. What a broad range of experience. What a gift to feel the world and make decisions from a place of varying perspectives. I had already been painting for six years by then. What the framework showed me was that I had been using emotions not as a subject but as a technique. A point of view.

I was not assigning colours to a feeling. I was mapping the flow of my emotional state through colour. Moving through the shifting spiral of going into and coming out of a feeling. Changing what most people understand as fixed states, happy or sad, good or bad, into something more accurate. An interactive exchange. A discovery.

As I moved into the Wild and Emergence collections the work became more than the stories of the women around the fire. It became reflective of my own journey through the feelings those conversations evoked. Instead of feeling overwhelmed by the bigness of my own emotions, in the studio I allowed them to create. I made visible the somatic release.

There has always been a sense of the subconscious coming through my abstract work. It has always felt like both mine and something larger. My voice and some greater voice in conversation. In the abstract this has always been a discovery. What will that cocreative energy make today. Conscious and subconscious working together. Knowing that my emotional center is unconscious, the work is a truer representation of that than I understood when I started.

Human Design gave me permission to experiment with using my emotional wave intentionally. It brought forth the Wild collection, the first works I painted with the conscious intention of using emotion as the method.

The Only Way Out Is Through holds all of this. The dark mass pressing down from the top of the canvas is not resolved. Below it, orange, pink, yellow push up through layers of blue and green. Not triumphant. Present. Stubborn. Alive. The painting is not about the experience of moving through something difficult. It is that movement, recorded on canvas, the emotional wave made visible in its actual form.

The Only Way Out Is Through. 30x40", acrylic on canvas. Wild collection, 2024. Available at margaretlipsey.com.