A new project that I have been working on this year is called, “Anger and Flowers”. This project explores developmentally normal childhood anger set within a society rife with gun violence and political animosity.
I am a parent of two young boys. My oldest, a five-year-old, is finishing preschool and preparing to start elementary school in the fall. As we approach this transition, his nervousness around school has increased. Many mornings he kicks and screams the whole way into school, and most afternoons he talks about how he has decided not to go back to school the next day. We try to empathize, acknowledge his feelings, and follow up with positive conversations about the importance of learning and building independence. While his anger stems from love—his love of being at home—his anger has increased tremendously.
And the closer we draw to elementary school, the more I can feel my own anxiety mounting as well. Besides my child’s nervous feelings and my own memories of educational and social pressures in school, I am concerned that schools have become less safe for children in recent years. I am navigating not only my own child’s normal, developmentally appropriate fears, but also my own fears about violence in school, especially gun violence.
I have taught my preschooler, in simple terms, that anger can influence people to choose to hurt others. When humans are angry, their bodies fill with vibrating thoughts and emotions that eventually need to go somewhere! Where will that anger go? Will it lead to more hurt and anger? Or could it lead to growth and strength? In all of these conversations, I return to one main question: “Can we teach our young people to make kind and brave choices while experiencing anger?” If we teach children to not fear anger, but to use it for good, would there be fewer immature adults who can not handle their anger? Could there be less violence? Could our world be a safer place?
While I work to survive in my small world of complications, my day-to-day pondering have led me to start a flower garden. I am a beginner gardener, and have so much to learn, but I did have the experience of watching my dad tend to his garden when I was young. As I grapple with my little son’s anger, as well as my own fears, I have begun to associate our battle for bravery with the flowers I am attempting to grow. The result of these creative processes entwining together has become my project called “Anger and Flowers”.
I am recording each comment my five-year-old says in anger. I hold the statements metaphorically in my heart and try to acknowledge his hard, hurt feelings for what they are—natural. I then use floral imagery to make paintings associated with each comment, aligning the growth of my garden with the growth of my child. I plan to create paintings for each angry comment, filling the gallery space with thoughts of anger and growth, violence and decay. I will be using water-based mediums on paper, including ink, watercolors, and home-made dyes. I have played around with color and transparency, noticing how these choices affect my depictions of the written statements spoken by my son. I plan to further experiment with paper size and scale of the abstract floral motif. I will also experiment with how I display the text in connection with the painting. I imagine paintings of assorted sizes, framed, throughout the gallery space.
I plan to learn through this process, as I come to terms with bringing up a child in a scary world. I hope that these paintings might further conversation and meditation on human nature, gun violence, safety in schools, mental health, and character development.
