Letting Art Hold You When Everything Shifts
Change comes in many forms—grief, growth, loss, transitions, new beginnings. Sometimes it arrives with thunder, sometimes like a slow tide. And in the midst of it, we often find ourselves untethered, seeking something to hold onto.
Art can be that something.
In this post, we explore how art—whether making it or simply surrounding yourself with it—can serve as a gentle anchor during times of transformation. You don’t need to be a professional artist. You only need to let yourself be moved.
1. Art as Witness and Companion
When life feels uncertain or heavy, we long to be seen. Art offers that sacred witnessing without judgment. A painting, a drawing, even a scribble in a notebook, can say: “I see you. This is real. This moment matters.”
Whether you create it or find it, art becomes a companion—quietly holding space for your emotions when words fail. It listens without asking for anything in return.
2. Creating to Process Emotion
Making art can be a way to transmute emotion—grief into colour, fear into movement, longing into texture. There is no right or wrong here. What you create doesn’t have to be beautiful. It doesn’t have to be shared.
What matters is the act of expression. You give shape to what lives inside you.
In times of change, this can feel like lighting a candle in the dark.
Try this:
Sit with your emotion. Pick a colour that matches it. Use your hands, a brush, anything at all. Let it move across the paper or canvas. Let it speak.
3. Finding Resonance in the Work of Others
Sometimes healing comes not through creating but through witnessing.
You see a painting and feel your heart soften. You recognise yourself in a curve of light or a wild bloom of colour. Someone else has named something you couldn’t. In that moment, you feel less alone.
Let yourself be drawn to the art that soothes or stirs you. It may hold a medicine your spirit is craving.
This is why many people are drawn to specific paintings during big life transitions—because they offer reflection, clarity, or even a glimpse of hope.
4. A Visual Anchor in Times of Uncertainty
When everything shifts around you, art can offer stability.
One painting on your wall, carefully chosen, can become a daily reminder of what you’re moving toward—or what you’re letting go of. It might symbolise a prayer, a promise, or simply a breath of beauty when things feel too heavy.
Art doesn’t fix what’s broken. But it can sit beside you. It can breathe with you. It can keep the candle lit until you’re ready to move forward again.
5. Reconnecting to Self Through Beauty
Change often shakes us loose from who we thought we were. In that tender, in-between space, beauty helps us remember.
Creating or connecting with art invites you back to yourself. It reconnects you to wonder, to curiosity, to your own capacity to feel and create—even in the midst of uncertainty.
Art says: You are still here. You are still whole, even in your becoming.
Closing Words
In times of change, we need gentle things. We need reminders of the sacred. We need colour, texture, symbols, silence.
Art offers all of that.
Let it hold you. Let it reflect you. Let it remind you that your transformation is holy.
⸻
Until the next brushstroke.
Anna-Lena