Art & The Complexity of Grief.

If you’ve ever experienced immense loss, you’ll know the hardest part isn't just the crying or the events leading up to it, It’s that quiet, surreal moment after you go home. When you return to your space, shut the door behind you, and stand in the stillness that doesn’t feel like yours anymore. Everything looks the same, but it isn’t.

You try to rest or relax but you can't because this impossible thing has happened and you don't know how to process it. Everything feels still but the world is still moving somehow, but inside you, something has frozen. You know you’re supposed to sleep but how do you lie down in a world that’s suddenly missing someone you thought would always be there?

There's a weight to those moments, a pressure that sits, like your chest is holding something too large, too heavy, too unknowable. You are completely suspended, Not in denial, but in some strange space between what was and what is.

I have lived through these moments more than once. Every time it happens it leaves its mark, and every time it happens I find myself returning to art like many of us do. Not because it necessarily fixes anything, but because it gives me a place to set things down. Grief is not something that just goes away, It lingers, It echoes, It reshapes everything it touches. Art is one of the few places where that reshaping can become visible, tangible & honest.

I think art in itself isn't just about expression, but containment, control. Its about giving shape to something that has no outline. Grief feels nearly impossible to hold all at once, but art lets us hold pieces of it. A brushstroke, a texture, a moment of contrast or stillness in a photograph. These tools are very much like containers for grief and pain. They help us look directly at something we would otherwise struggle to comprehend.

This is why while not all great art has sorrow, so much great art has sorrow woven into its core. Not because artists seek out suffering, but because suffering is often transformed & transmuted. It needs to be moved into something in order to give us space to heal.

Grief often resists language, Its not always linear or logical. It returns in cycles, sometimes with no warning and Art is one of the few ways we can navigate that return. Not by resolving it right away, but by exploring it, By moving within it. Art allows us to dwell in grief without needing to solve it. It makes space for us to stay present with our pain.

There is a strange kind of clarity that comes with grief. It strips away the unnecessary. It makes you aware of time in a new way. It also exposes whats meaningful and what isn't. so when you create from a place like that, the work ultimately changes and changes you. It doesn't need to be polished or perfect, It just needs to be honest.

When i look back at some of my own work, I often realize i was processing grief without even knowing it. The absence of color, The focus on shadow and contrast and the unknowable. All of it became a language for expressing grief.

And this is what art can give us, A place to go when there's nowhere else to. A place where the rules of processing our experiences can be whatever we want them to be. Where grief is allowed to exist in its rawest form in a way that society doesn't openly allow.

I think this is why we often return to our craft during stages of grief and why we continue to create even when the pain becomes too much. Because art becomes the only place where our grief is allowed to breathe and take up space.

I wouldn't say that Art erases grief but it can help us live with it, and through that coexistence, who we are is revealed.