Healing Emotional and Mental Wounds Through the Act of Making Art

Healing Emotional and Mental Wounds 
Through the Act of Making Art

By: “Vercmagnus” Estuardo Chavez

Before there were diagnoses, prescriptions, or labels for emotional pain,
there was creation. Humans have always turned to making things when
words failed. We scratched symbols into stone, painted animals on cave
walls, stitched stories into fabric, and sang grief into rhythm. Art was never
a luxury. It was a survival language.

My own healing through art began quietly in the early 1990s, long before I
understood what I was healing from. I started as a watercolor artist.
Watercolor taught me surrender. You cannot control it the way you control
other media. Water moves where it wants. Pigment bleeds, spreads, and
sometimes disappears entirely. At the time, I did not realize it, but
watercolor was teaching me how to let go. How to allow emotion to flow
instead of forcing it into neat lines.

Watercolor mirrored my inner world. Delicate, unpredictable, sometimes
messy, sometimes luminous. It allowed me to express feelings I did not yet
have language for. There was relief in watching color travel across wet
paper, knowing I did not have to explain myself to anyone.

Alongside painting, I maintained a deep love for leatherwork. Leather is the
opposite of watercolor. It is tactile, grounded, resistant. It must be handled,
shaped, pressed, and respected. Working with leather taught me patience
and strength. It connected me to my hands and to the physical world when
my thoughts felt overwhelming. Leather carries history. It bears marks. It
ages. That felt honest to me.

As years passed, I realized I did not have to choose one medium over
another. My emotional life was not singular, so my art did not need to be
either. I began incorporating different materials into one piece. Fabric,
leather, paper, paint, and found objects. Mixed media became my language
because it allowed complexity. Healing is not linear.

Why should art be?
Combining media allowed me to hold contradictions. Softness and
resistance. Flow and structure. Fragility and endurance. Each material
carried a different emotional tone. Together, they reflected the layered
nature of the human experience.

In 2000, I fell deeply in love with acrylic painting. Acrylic gave me freedom
without fragility. It dried quickly, accepted texture, and allowed me to build
layers without fear of collapse. Acrylic felt like confidence. It let me take risks,
scrape back, paint over, and begin again. That mattered emotionally. It taught
me that mistakes were not permanent. That transformation was always possible.

Acrylic painting became a place where everything I had learned could coexist.
The flow of watercolor. The grounding of leather. The storytelling of mixed
media. The courage to layer, erase, and rebuild. Every piece became a
conversation between past and present.

Creating art shifted my nervous system in ways I did not yet understand. When I
worked, my breath slowed. My mind softened. The constant internal noise
quieted. I was not fixing myself. I was listening. Art gave my emotions
somewhere to go so they no longer lived entirely inside my body.

Healing through art does not mean avoiding pain. It means approaching it safely.
When emotion stays internal, it grows heavy and endless. When expressed, it
becomes finite. It gains edges.

You can observe it rather than drown in it.
Art also restored my sense of agency. Emotional wounds can make life feel
reactive and powerless. But when you choose a color, a texture, a material, you
make decisions again. Small ones at first. Then the bolder ones. That confidence
spills into life outside the studio.

Importantly, healing through art is not about beauty or talent. It is about
honesty. Some of my most meaningful pieces were never meant to be seen. They
were made to be felt, processed, and released.

Art gave me continuity. Each piece marked a moment in time. Together, they
formed a quiet record of survival. Not perfection. Presence.
I still believe art existed before medicine for a reason. It meets the human mind
where it is. It does not demand explanations. It does not rush healing. It simply
holds space.

Healing through art is not about becoming someone new. It is about returning to
yourself, again and again, with compassion.
And for me, that return has always begun with making something with my hands.

This story is a part of my book called VERCMAGNUS COLLAGE AND PAINTING, 

which you can read and obtain the full copy on Google Books Store HERE