September 25, 2026
“Where are you?”- Art Therapy & Healing: Processing Childhood Trauma Through Mixed Media
Happy Friday! It’s cool, damp, windy, and definitely autumn—I don’t know why I don’t like saying “fall.” Anyway, it’s been a while since I journaled. I had to come back and edit a few things on another post because I can be overly assumptive sometimes, but I’m getting better. At the risk of being dialectic, my mental health is like a fog—a dark blue fog over a white fog, if that makes sense to anyone out there. I don’t know if it’s an artist thing, a polymath thing, or what. But anyway, that’s it. I’m fighting depression and trying to move forward each day, and I’m grateful that I have the time to focus on myself. I really am.
So in the art world, I’m trying to process some stuff. I think “processing trauma” is a very strong phrase to use, but yet it’s true after all these years. It’s like the universe, the spirit, God, whomever, whatever, will give you things or let you figure out the things that you haven’t been able to figure out for years—an awakening of sorts. Some people call it a spiritual awakening.
But as with all things like that, once you have an awakening, then you have to do something with it. You remember it, you cherish it, you want to fix something, you want to do all kinds of things with it. Well, for me, I do art.
I don’t want to get too personal, but when I was a child, I woke up in the dark and panicked because nobody was around and I didn’t know what to do. I don’t know how long it was like that, but I do remember—even though I was a little kid—that was one hell of a fear. It was raw, instinctive fear. It is the definition of screaming; it’s the definition of crying. I’ve been there. But as the years passed, I only thought about it on occasion and just said, “Hey, that’s childhood.”
It was not.
So to help me process this alone-in-the-dark demon, so to speak—I-don’t-know-what-to-call-it thing—to process this memory, I do artwork. My artwork is very expressive, and this particular piece of artwork is simply called Where Are You? with a subtitle of What Do You See Here?
The work is a photograph that I printed out in black and white on a laser printer and an inkjet printer. It’s a photo of a work in progress that I did a while back, and when I looked at it, I was like, “Wow,” because it was a throwaway piece. It was like one of the first couple of pieces that just don’t seem to work out and I throw them aside, because I can always use the paper for something, especially when you’re gel printing or doing any type of manual printing.
So, I take pictures of these using Adobe Capture, which captures images in black and white vectors—it’s like making an instant vector of a photograph—and I can save it to my Adobe Library. I’ve been using Adobe products for about 35 years now. I remember Photoshop 3! I remember when the Clone Stamp tool was awesome—lol
Anyway, keeping them as vector SVG files for the transparent background, I then stacked one on top of the other. I didn’t do any manual manipulation; I just took the vector images as they were, stacked one on top of the other as if in a frame, and then printed it out.
After I printed it out, I tried several different ways to lay it down for the print. Failure after failure! I didn’t want to do the standard thing on a gel print where you put down black paint and peel it up and all this other stuff, so I basically took the actual printout on printer paper, cut it out, and placed it upside down on my gel plate. Then I applied vinegar to help the paper erode a little bit. Long story short, I did a little bit of yellow, a little bit of blue, and mostly titanium white, and put the top layer on (which becomes the background layer). I layered that on, and when I gradually peeled it up—the video’s on my Instagram—I was like, “Okay, it’s still kind of damp, but my image is sticking to the card that I want to use.” It’s a 4×6 thick watercolor paper card.
So I took great care, and I finally got a little bit of Golden Soft Gel (matte) over the top of it to seal it in. Now it’s just kind of sitting there drying, and I don’t know what to further do with it. And of course, that’s the reference photo.
So that’s my week. My brain is like that fog, and my creativity is very abstract and fragmented. I’m depressed sometimes, angry sometimes, and frustrated sometimes—more so than I usually am, for those of you who know me. But I’m not sure of what I’m doing. I don’t know if I want to soothe some pain or erase some pain, I don’t know. But I do know this: I’m just trying to get a better understanding of myself in the later years of my life. Because when you get to my age and they start calling you a senior citizen, your brain kind of changes and you start to see the end of the street, so to speak.
Anyway, I’m going to keep on trucking. You guys keep on trucking. Thank you for your time today! My cooking alarm is going off and my lunch is ready, so take care, be good to each other, and I will talk to you later. Thank you for your time.
Love,Mark