Art Is..
I was the loner who sat at the back of church on Sundays waiting for the service end so that I could slip out and run home, afraid of meeting new people and having conversations of how great a sermon and worship was.
Valkiry Wagner
It wasn’t also easy for me to come here and use my voice to write.
For a long time I was a person who suffered with social anxiety. As a child, I grew up only speaking to my own family members and even that was socially awkward. I was mostly a loner, a quiet child whose socially anxiety caused teachers to mark me absent on rosters because they didn’t see the quiet hand raised up. Even at my previous churches, I was the loner who sat at the back of church on Sundays waiting for the service end so that I could slip out and run home, afraid of meeting new people and having conversations of how great a sermon and worship was. I think my mom noticed how awful life was for me as a socially anxious person.
My mother was an artist – to be more exact, a painter. She decided that I needed to communicate in an artful language. She placed me in art classes at a young age. Throughout middle school and high school I built a portfolio filled of still life. My still life’s where charcoal drawing of objects that didn’t speak, but they captured the stillness and quietness of life. My art teacher would place arrangements of plants, lanterns, chairs, and magazine pages for the students to draw with white black, and gray charcoal. During my still life sessions, the students and I never spoke to each other. The teacher would walk around the room pointing to the places that needed more refined curves and lines. She would grab our pencils, erase, and show us how to create these lines and then she would continue to walk around. At the end of the class, our canvases and white crisp paper was placed around the the still life objects and we would only make eye contact with each other’s art. The drawings spoke for us.
In college I took no art classes. I gave up on art because in college I knew there would be other artists who were better than me. I knew that in college I would actually have to speak with students, present my pieces to a class of 30 or 300 students, and speak with the art professor. I already had medium to high levels of social anxiety with different course presentations. I also found myself regretting the crisp white paper and charcoal drawings, I wanted something more. I wanted art to stop failing me in its beautiful quiet strength of still life, I wanted to feel the magic of art to transform me into a confident social person and artist. When I started dating my husband I had hit the highest peak I ever had of social anxiety. Though I was suffering from mild depression, stress, and insecurities I started to cope with art.
I logged onto my YouTube account and found a famous face and body painter, Kay Pike Fashion. I heard her say that body painting and character transformation helped with her own struggles of anxiety. She inspired me to start doing the same. I was a child who suffered with social anxiety but who parents would transport her to comic book stores on Saturdays and I would get lost in the worlds of superheros and villains. Kay Pike inspired me to create my first transformation, Seven of Nine from Star Trek. Something about the feeling of wet face paint on my skin and the concentration on filling in lines with colors relaxed me and calmed my social anxiety down. It wasn’t one dimensional art anymore like the still lifes, it was multidimensional. There were new materials, new mediums of makeup, and new comic book characters to create. Eyeliners became my charcoal and face paint became my paint. This cosplay or more so cospainting made me feel alive and strong again.
It gave me the strength to start my own Youtube channel, Valkyrie Makeup.
Editors Note: Support Valkiry, It’s been inspiring to watch her rise and learn as a makeup artist and we need to support our MUA’s of color!- Here’s her Youtube
It gave me the strength and courage to share this new amazing art form with others around the world. It helped me to connect with people, and to network, because of this my social anxiety has subsided into almost to nothing now. Art is truly strength and beauty, but it is also whatever you want it to be. Art is a fairy godmother who has the power to transform you. Art is a form of being itself. It holds imaginations, feelings, and gives you a sort of super power. For me, it’s a doctor who has listened to my thoughts and imaginations. It is a doctor who has prescribed face and body painting once a week to help with stress and anxiety of meeting new people. It is the art form that that has shaped my life and has made me less afraid of meeting new people. It has made me less socially awkward. I am forever grateful to the artists like Kay Pike who create new forms of art and to art itself because of the strength it gives.
