Can Gray Be Beautiful?

I delayed starting this painting called ‘Empty Vessels’ like I’ve delayed a lot of things in life; exercise, learning about mortgages, but most notably, addressing my problem with alcohol. It made sense at the time to kick that can down the road because there was always one more reason why it wasn’t the right time. It’s my friend’s birthday! How will she know I love her unless I get shitfaced at her party? I think I saw a daffodil today and so it’s time for me to drink gin outside! Right now, it’s the World Cup and sobriety is about as fun as an own goal, but I persist because it’s been 8 months and I’m not going to fuck it up today.

This painting is an interesting one for me because it involves a lot of firsts. It’s the first time I’ve used oil paint since I was about 15 when I’d use my mum’s old paints and huff turpentine in my room (I’m partially joking). It’s the first time I’ve done an underpainting, which is when you paint the canvas with thinned paint and carve out where the light and dark parts will be. In any painting, I’m aiming for contrast either in color or light because that’s how the brain understands what it’s looking at. This is also one of the biggest paintings I’ve done at 36 x 24 inches.

‘Empty Vessels’ is one of a handful of paintings I’ve done as an adult without so much as one glass of wine. I have been stone cold sober throughout. If you look closely, you’ll see that this painting has many gray bricks that are almost calling out to be painted with a prosecco in hand. On some days it’s harder to block out the gremlins than others.

Oil paints are sometimes called a ‘noble’ medium because of their luminosity and depth. Pigments are suspended in drying oils, like linseed or walnut oil, and encased in a transparent film, which allows light to penetrate the paint and reflect the underlying layers. Luminosity and depth remind me of how sobriety is talked about – it’s universally seen as a noble thing to do. The reality, of course, is that it’s a grind.

In my last blog post, I described the most beloved job I’ve ever had – motherhood – as a grind as well. How you feel about the daily tasks of parenting has absolutely nothing to do with how much you love your kids. Just because something is difficult or tedious at times, it doesn’t mean you made the wrong choice. That’s what I choose to believe about sobriety too.

I recently learned that much like parenthood, the effects of alcohol are not gender neutral. Women face something called the ‘telescoping effect’, which means they progress from initial drinking to alcohol dependence faster than men. This is because of differences in body water content, metabolism and brain chemistry. While my sex may not have protected me in this area, there’s somewhere else it has given me an advantage. Research has shown that biological women are more adept at distinguishing grayscale and color due to distinct wiring in the visual cortex, so we often see more shades of color than men.

Shades of gray describe the bricks in my painting and the feelings of monotony that seem to overwhelm sobriety. Distinguishing shades of light and dark certainly help when doing an underpainting, but without color it doesn’t sound very interesting, does it?

I have to remember that my brain is playing a trick on me when I go down this path because alcohol does not equal color and happiness. Instead, it’s a neurotoxin that creates temporary feelings of fun. I say this to myself on repeat not because I’m now a sobriety evangelist; if you can be trusted with a drink then all power to you. I say it because it’s helpful for me. The brain needs boredom as a prompt to reset from overstimulation, just as I think I need sobriety to recover from the damage alcohol has done to my psyche. So, for the purposes of recovery, I can try to find beauty in the boredom and the shades of gray in the hope that it leads somewhere more comfortable for my brain to live. I think gray can be beautiful if you need it to be.