We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Angie Edwards. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Angie below.
Angie, appreciate you joining us today. We’d love to hear about a project that you’ve worked on that’s meant a lot to you.
Since I am at the beginning of my art career, I really only have one project to speak of, but it is incredibly meaningful to me. When I started painting, I was a young mom making art in my kitchen that ended up hidden in my closet and no one ever saw. I didn’t set out to make art as a way to heal or help others, but that’s what happened. I now have a body of work that tells a story of a struggling young mom with a secret trauma and addiction, through exposing the trauma, and then the continual journey of recovery from both trauma and addiction. These paintings have been a part of my healing and now I am sharing them with others as an example of how art can be a part of their healing, too. The meaning for me is not only in helping myself, but in being able to share this with others. I feel incredibly blessed to be at the point I am at now. Not because I am “perfect” or fully healed, but because I’ve come out of a place of despair, immense anxiety, depression, and PTSD to a place of growth and resilience. There is no better thing I can think to do but offer the hope to others that they can healing is possible, and art is one tool that can help them with it.
Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.
Hi everyone! I’m Angie, a wife, mother of three, oil painter, podcaster. Without planning it, my art tells a story that has a beginning, middle, and present – but there is no end. Not yet, anyway. Here’s a little background on my influences and life experiences that have gotten me to where I am today as a podcaster sharing my story and art to help other artists that have experienced trauma find hope and healing through their art.
I grew up in Milwaukee, Wisconsin in and around the great Lake Michigan and many smaller lakes throughout the state. My time spent around water growing up has heavily influenced my life and my work. In 2008, my husband and I moved our family to Austin, Texas. While Austin doesn’t have a Great Lake, it does have a thriving art community that’s inspired me since I’ve been here. Moving to Austin began a series of breaking old patterns, and started my path of healing and recovery.
Before that move, my husband and I felt stuck in our lives. We had become parents at a young age, catapulting us into adulthood in our late teens. Him into a career of software development, and me into being a mom and homemaker. We lived in the country, isolated from friends and social outlets which was both a protection and means to hide our growing dependence on marijuana and video games to help us “cope” with our overwhelming responsibilities.
I started creating art in high school and it was the one thing I continued to do after giving birth to my son just after graduation. My first pieces were drawings in colored pencils, which is when I discovered my love for blending colors. From there, I began oil painting. I had never taken a class on it, I just loved the buttery-ness of the paint and the slow drying time that allowed me to blend colors to my heart’s content. I never planned out my paintings, I simply put on some music and started playing around until images began to emerge.
What I didn’t realize at the time, because I had no idea it’s effect on me, was how art was playing a role in healing from childhood abuse that I kept a secret for almost 30 years. When I did finally talk about it, I continued to use art to express my anger, confusion, pain, and despair. As I began to. heal, my art changed. Now it was expressing hope, light, and even joy!
It’s been a 10 year (and counting!) journey so far of both trauma and addiction recovery for me. I started a podcast to share my story and offer hope to other artists that may be in a similar place I was, or am in now. Because I wish I had known how much that secret trauma was affecting every aspect of my life. I wish someone had told me there was a way out of feeling stuck and not understanding why.
I also realized that I love encouraging people to create! Art is so much more important than we sometimes give it credit for and it’s often the first thing we give up when our schedules get full. But for artists in trauma and addiction recovery it’s an important tool to help us reconnect with ourselves, release our past, and live more fully. That is what I have experienced and what I want to share with others.
What do you think is the goal or mission that drives your creative journey?
Trauma, anxiety, depression, and addiction are at all time highs throughout the world right now. My mission is to help relieve some of that pain through sharing my story and offering encouragement to others that healing is possible and art can help us get there. I know I can’t make these problems disappear and that art is just one part of the healing process. But from my experience, it can be a very powerful tool in our recovery.
It wasn’t that long ago that I was shackled in my addiction and unhealed childhood trauma and diagnosed with PTSD. I’ve done a lot of things to get through it and decided to focus on art as a way to help others because: 1. I’m not a licensed therapist, and 2. I’ve seen and experienced the breakthroughs that creating art provides.
There is a lot of pain in the world, but there is so much beauty, too. Sometimes it’s hard to see the beautiful parts. I want to shed light on the beauty while holding space for the broken to mend. Creating art is one way to do that. People need to know that healing is possible. I’m here to spread that message.
Let’s talk about resilience next – do you have a story you can share with us?
YesI I’d love to. Resilience plays such an important role in recovery and life in general, and I recently started to understand it in a new way. I’ll explain what I mean by sharing an example of resilience in my journey so far.
It is because of resilience that I am sitting down to do this interview, because to be completely honest, I haven’t made a podcast episode in about 7 months. Even with the passion I have for my mission to help artists who are recovering from trauma, I am still a mom, wife, and person in recovery. As we all know, even when we’ve done a lot of work to heal, life still brings circumstances that require emotional energy. So I’ve had to step back from making podcast episodes to take care of myself.
When I was asked to do this interview, I was preparing to come back to my podcast, but I also took some time to check in and be sure I had the emotional capacity. It was in that contemplation of this past year, that I saw the growth. This is when I understood resilience in a new way because I often only recognize it in the big moments and miss all the small, supposedly “inconsequential” times when I was challenged and kept going that not only strengthened my resilience, but took resilience to achieve, too.
Now I think of resilience more as an undercurrent that’s always there, it just needs time and experience to grow. I’m so grateful for this interview that’s given me an opportunity to both use and strengthen my resilience by answering these questions and expanding my reach.
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