Art Therapy INTERVIEW with Georgina Baillie

from BLUSH Magazine- October 2020

Art on a Plate with Lynda Stretton

Freedom to fly Therapy 28 BLUSH | WINTER 2020 For Georgina Baillie, art has helped her overcome life’s challenges – she shares her story… How did art touch your life? I loved art at school and had great teachers until my A-Levels, when one teacher didn’t seem to like my work and discouraged me. Also I am not academic in any way – so I didn’t want to write essays about art, I just wanted to do it. I put the pencil down in 2003, and I didn’t pick it up again until after my first stint in rehab – where I mentally unpacked a lot of difficult stuff and needed to expel it somehow. Was art a part of therapy for you? Or did you pick it up again because you had gone through rehab and realised it had been lost during your school days? As part of therapy definitely; we did art and I found myself suddenly able to express my feelings again. Did it then make you reflect on what that teacher had said? I started to look at art differently, not like something that needed to be graded anymore. I knew that my skills were stunted, so my early drawings (in 2017) were cartoon-like – But it didn’t matter to me, as long as I could see how I was feeling on the page in front of me and share it with others. What path are you on with art? Art to me, is a personal thing. It was a huge surprise to be asked to draw people. It’s a dream isn’t it really? But I am currently studying counselling and would love to work with recovering addicts. Also, I’ve been working on a book about my life. Will you share some art in the chapters of your autobiography? I will definitely incorporate my art with the story in the book. How else can people experience your art? Recently I have started doing tiny commissions for people like women sending me their photos to be drawn as one of my ‘French girls’ – I love drawing the female form because I love how every woman has something different and I like expressing her energy through a picture. How do you feel about parting with a final piece? I mainly sell screen prints of my work and keep the originals – I don’t know if I could part with them! But I love the response I get for my work when people comment that they got some emotional relief through identification, just by looking at them. BLUSH | LEISURE & LIFESTYLE ART I didn’t want to write essays about art sevenstarmedia.co.uk

Can you describe your work and how you go about creating a piece?

I use pencil and paint or I screen paint. I take a photo of it and in true millennial style, (I was born in 1985 so I am the oldest of the millennial), I then tweak it so it creates the atmosphere I want. They finally get screen printed.

Do you think you have to travel through hardship to

achieve your dream? I usually start by a I love drawing the female picture coming into my head when I have form been talking about a certain subject in therapy, and then a way to express it comes to me – I have to do it pretty soon after, otherwise it vanishes.

I am a sum of my experiences, I wouldn’t be the version of myself without travelling this exact route full of extreme highs and crushing lows. And this is reflected in my artwork. Each piece does relate to a chapter in my life.