Many artists - musicians, writers or painters - document their emotions, experiences and thoughts through and with their art.

And so did I with this abstract art series called Making Sense.

The feeling of restlessness has been dominating my days and weeks since April. And although it seemed difficult to make time for creating art when I hustled in multiple jobs and drafted plan B and C just in case, I did manage to sit down and draw. Frankly said, I struggle to make meditation a daily routine, especially when I have thousands of things on my mind. Nevertheless, I can switch off when creating art and use it as my meditation. I’ve realised the healing power of it.

I created Making Sense in November 2020 when reflecting on the rollercoaster of the past few months, still feeling overwhelmed by how the world changed so dramatically and fast. I took my iPad, iPen and Procreate app and started to draw lines. I added more and more lines that resulted in a chaotic and overloaded looking piece of line art. The yellow and the washed out pink create some balance and give a bit of lightness to the heavy dark lines. It’s almost impossible to see the few faces that I drew in there.

Looking at it now, I cannot see what it is. It’s simply chaos. Chaos that looks beautiful and overwhelming at the same time. And that’s how I feel about 2020. The pandemic year has brought a lot of conflicts and challenges to the surface at the same time. The ones I dealt the most with were financial stress, not trusting a lacking, rusty, and unjust health care system, racism right in front of me and how it limits the potential of great people, a government whose politicians are disconnected from the people and simply incompetent, and an increased anxiety level of all the people around me. That anxiety level made some painful nuisances and selfish ass****, pardon my French. Others were and are feeling lost and shut themselves out. Especially men have a hard time saying “I’m not okay”. The extra pressure to man up in those difficult situations impacts not only their mental health but also their life choices.

The two things that I have learned this year are to SIMPLIFY the way l live as much as I can, and FOCUS on the things that have a lasting impact and create positive change.

Because my art is created digitally, I am working with layers which enabled me to take lines out of a piece or adding them back into it. Taking things off my do-to list, reducing the noise in my life by choosing wisely what I read, learn and with whom I spend time my time, this is all about removing and adding lines to my piece of art = life.

That’s how I try to Making Sense of this weird but extraordinary year 2020 and move on.
Explore the three Making Sense pieces here.