Dayglow

When I started making art, I used it to cope with my mental illness. 

There were never-ending nights in the past where I would stare at my ceiling praying for a miracle so that what I was going through would end, or that I would somehow wake up as someone else in an alternate world. 

Soon, these same nights were filled with drawing, and filling as many pages of my sketchbook as possible.

In the past, when I was struggling most with my mental illness, I was able to just enjoy the process of creating for what it was. There were no expectations tied to my art, apart from wanting to make something I could pour my feelings into.

I was also able to implement this while I was creating this piece. Even though I feel I let go of the tension of expectations in this piece, I hope I can push this further in the future. I still found myself fixating on certain aspects of this painting and wanting to perfect them, but I want to radically accept that perfection does not exist in my pieces, in myself, or others.

In addition, I feel that if I were asked to recreate my drawings from when I was struggling most with my mental health, I would not be able to. I feel this demonstrates how my mind has evolved and changed over time, which I feel is an important aspect to the context of this piece.

Up until now, I have never really experimented with colour, as all my pieces were either achromatic or had a limited palette. In this piece, however, I wanted to see how far I could go. I didn’t really put much thought into what colours to use other than wanting there to be lots of it. I wanted the blocks of colour to sort of “whirl” around the person’s head in a way, and I thought of them as stories of other people and how some are similar and connected but individual at the same time, which is why some of them mix and are superimposed on each other but are still separate. 

People often don’t think of what others are going through or they assume that if they (being an entirely different person) went through something similar, that the other person must feel the same way they do. What people often don’t realize is that everyone experiences things differently even if the situations were identical in every aspect.

My final thought is that the way I felt making this piece was very different from when I remember making art back then. Before, I had not been through therapy, in-patient treatment, or psychiatry visits, but when I made this piece, I had been through all of this and had begun to recover. 

In the past, I was uncertain of what was to come in the future, but now, even though I feel things are starting to worsen again, I have been through it before and kept going even when I thought things couldn’t get worse and then did. So, it is not nearly as scary and I know I can do it again.

“It will pass.”

Artist Name: Maycotte-Rojas

Title: Dayglow

Medium: Acrylic paint on canvas

Size: 34.6cm x 44.3cm

Year: Fall 2021