PART FIVE
LITTLE GIRL WITH A BRAVE HEART
Here’s the fifth part of the story
“In 2000, I started painting again. In 2001, I met my husband. He was the one that also helped heal me, he’s a wonderful man. When you get married, your fears and frustrations you take out on the closest person. You hurt the person you love the most because somebody has to pay. In my case, he had to pay because of what happened to me. I was so angry because of this history of abuse.” She talks with a genuine, vibrant love gleaming in her eyes as she tells me of the man, her husband, who held her close through the tears and the fights and steadied her soul to heal. “Reflecting pain is very emotional.” She lets out a laugh and I follow suit, her story echoing inside of me like the voice of little girl lost down a well.
We begin to talk a bit more about Leonie’s art and her relationship with her paintings, and the whirlwind of emotions that still exist in every stroke of the paintbrush, so many years after what was inflicted upon her.Artist: Lenie E. Brown
“It’s not like a bin that a truck takes away. That rubbish stays there. It’s part of you. You have to take it out, look at it and clean it up. That is, for me, going back to why I paint what I paint. Sitting in that place of darkness doesn’t bring healing. Regurgitating that pain and vomiting it out on the canvas helps. And it might be able to help somebody, somehow, subliminally, to realise there’s is something more for them than this place they are in right now. I don’t want to help people sit in prison, I want to help people get out of the prison of their emotions. I want to create something where somebody can look at it, and if they have gone through the same experience, it brings hope. Hope that they too can heal.”
It’s a powerful emotion, hope. It’s in every corner of Leonie’s paintings, in every layer and in every stroke. Because she projects the way she was able to heal in her work and, looking at it, I am awash with that emotion. “We have to face the things that we have gone through. I have to face the fact that people hurt me, but I need to forgive them because if I don’t forgive them, it’s like me drinking the poison and hoping that they will die.”
I want to learn more about abstract art and specifically, Leonie’s methods, so I move on to asking her about her processes. “I experiment a lot. I combine things that I shouldn’t to see if it works. What I do is very experimental. That’s how I discovered encaustic painting, through experimenting with hot wax and resin.” There’s definitely a freedom about her paintings, a flow that reminds of waves breaking at the shoreline. I ask her if all of her works are experimental.