Blog / 2024 / A Series of Paintings, a Lesson Plan, and a Coloring Book about Mental Health

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT

[ME SPEAKING]

Everything’s Fine: one project with three formats. The first is a series of nineteen seriously whimsical and whimsically serious paintings. The second is a free high school art lesson plan that teaches students how to make similarly serious and whimsical paintings. And the third is a mental health workbook that is full of nineteen coloring pages—dreamlike, seriously whimsical coloring pages.

But, before all that, at the beginning, it was just the paintings—so many paintings about feelings! They’re surreal artworks, mashing up imagery that, at first, doesn’t seem to go together. A marching band whose members are all cats? A rose lacking outward prickliness but with a thorny thought bubble? A bird that’s singing a strange version of itself? Each painting reveals an emotional truth without naming it outright.

I called the collection of artworks Everything’s Fine, because everything isn’t. With the ever-scarier threats of global warming as well as the daily trauma of white supremacy, misogyny, homophobia, transphobia, ableism, and gun violence, I didn’t want anyone to think they’re the only one struggling with anxiety or depression.

Specifically, I didn’t want today’s teens—kids whose childhood was shaped by the pandemic—to think they’re alone in having difficulty connecting with others. These paintings were always about them. And about the adolescent that lives on in many adults, or at least the sixteen year old part of me that never quite figured out how to relate to others, also known a part of me that still exists in my core.

[ALLIE SPEAKING]

“To me what really stands out is the self-portraiture. The way that the ‘figure’ takes a lot of different forms. Including replacing your head with traffic lights, becoming an animal of some sort, becoming the little robot with the social media. It’s great tool to talk to students about how many forms self-portraiture can take in the age of selfies and filters. It can be hard for them to look at themselves in a mirror and to have that be the subject for an art assignment. And so to say: here’s so many ways you can express yourself. Here’s how you can change your figure. Don’t be afraid. Look at this artist!”

[ME SPEAKING]

The lesson plan version of Everything’s Fine is meant for high school art teachers. It sums up the history of surrealism, and then it digs into how students can make their own images about how they’re feeling. It describes learning objectives in some detail, including the idea of teaching kids to communicate visually about a subject without just creating a straightforward image of that subject. It’s the difference between showing you’re angry by painting yourself with eyebrows knit together and eyes glaring versus painting a volcano erupting with a heart made of lava. The lesson plan includes a step-by-step for delivering the lesson and access to tons of process images for my paintings.

And then there’s the coloring book version of Everything’s Fine.

[MARIA SPEAKING]

“I kind of see this work as an opportunity for kids who might be intimidated by coming up with their own images. Those kids are often excluded from our art experiences in school. The fabulous thing about the concept of this coloring book is that students can engage in a really easy therapeutic way that they don’t have to beat themselves up about.”

[ME SPEAKING]

Everything’s Fine the mental health workbook is designed to help teens and adults embrace their complexity with creativity and kindness. It contains nineteen dreamlike coloring pages and the questions for reflection to go with them.

The book is set up to first allow you to have a moment alone with each image. The questions on the page facing the image are all about that image, things like:

What do these nine cats have to say? Which one do you relate to most? If you were in this marching band, which instrument would be yours and why?

Once you’ve had that moment with the image—answering questions and coloring—you turn the page and first there’s a page almost completely black that’s meant to hide any ink that might bleed through from the coloring you’ve done, and then the conversation is with me. I talk about what the cats symbolize in my world, and I share about my struggles a bit. On this page, there’s a grid of dots that makes space for a more flexible response, which might be bullet journaling, doodling, drawing.

The pages that give you space to dialogue with the image and then the pages that invite you to reflect with me are repeated for each image.

Over the last decade, coloring books for kids as well as adults have become more and more popular as a way of relieving stress. Even the Mayo Clinic agrees that coloring can be good for your health. But the coloring book version of Everything’s Fine takes it a step further. It encourages you to use words too as a way to hopefully help you figure out how to articulate more about what’s going on in your mind.

However you use it, Everything’s Fine—the series of paintings, the free high school art lesson plan, the mental health workbook—all of it meant to belong to you at least as much as it belongs to me. I made this project with you in mind, both because I need to feel less alone and because I want you to feel that connection as well.