About
A Journey Through Emotion, Nature & Expression
On a day that ended in horror, I sprang out of bed in my studio apartment and worked on a pencil drawing. I felt pure joy drawing and painting after a decade of seeing my creativity thwarted by trauma: mind, body and spiritual burnout from a systems engineering and management career, death of loved ones, the heart-crushing realization that my husband of 28 years loved me not. I sang while I drew, envisioning painting the landscape depicted in the drawing in oil or watercolor, exploring abstracted realism, and learning to create posters in Adobe Photoshop.
At 7:10 p.m. on January 21, 2020, I stepped into a marked crosswalk and felt agonizing pain in my back and wooziness in my head as a gigantic SUV slammed into me. As the truck dragged me an estimated 20 feet, I begged, stop, please stop. I can’t die now. My creativity just began.” I was 60 years old.
This new trauma was just beginning. When covid hit a month later, my doctors and therapists cancelled appointments for injuries from brain to toe. A year and a half after the accident, my son and only child died in a house fire.
About Anne Gaulden
After years of various therapies, meditation, deep gratitude for all life has to offer, copious amounts of self-help books and courses and the unwavering love of my new husband (a tale all in itself), I believed myself again ready to draw, paint and create. Yet, when I stood in front of my easel, I felt like a soldier who just learned that her enemies had armed the field she must cross with land mines. Inside my traumatized brain, I believed that if I drew or painted, something horrible would happen.
My neurotherapist and counselor at North Idaho Neurotherapy (Sandpoint Neurotherapy | Home - North Idaho's #1 Neurotherapy Clinic) recognized my creative block as Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). Using a combination of EMDR (EMDR Therapy: What It Is, Procedure & Effectiveness) and neurotherapy, she had me reprocess and change the creative-blocking thoughts.
Five years after leaving my previous husband, surviving my accident, covid, and the death of my only child, I painted a bull moose with bright, joyful colors that reflected how I felt about these magnificent creatures I see in my front and back yards. I followed that with an even bigger painting of a cow and calf moose I painted with palette knives.
The more I let go of the idea of getting back to my pre-accident brain that led multimillion dollar projects and programs, the more I love and appreciate my post traumatic brain. Because I no longer deal well with competing stimuli, I find myself more present and peaceful as I design, draw or paint a piece of art. Years of therapy healed me of a significant amount of hypervigilance, headaches and insomnia while making me fearless, playful, and intentional in artmaking. With each work of art, I intend to offer my viewers a joyous experience and respite from tension while inspiring them to appreciate nature and life.
