Find Your Anchor

My painting “Recovering” is about my anchor. Last year after coming back to school and getting involved with several school activities, I had some problems with mental health- overthinking stuff, getting pressured, not maging my time wisely- so I had to find a way to go back and make an anchor. As I was working on this art piece, I thought about what my anchor is and how I use it. Since I thought that I needed to focus and concentrate on my studying and academics, I chose studying as my anchor and started using my schoolwork to help me refocus and give myself a sense of accomplishment.

With this piece, my goal was to show a runner escaping a cluster of chaotic things. Running has been my “anchor” over the past few months, so I decided to have the person running away from the sort of nonsensical, disorganized madness that, without an anchor, can really leave people detached from what matters. I painted the runner fairly small because it allowed the overwhelmingness of all of the stuff behind it to show through, while also setting them in front of the objects to give the idea of an escape. I also used night and day to represent the more chaotic aspects of the right side of the painting and the calm of the left.