At a recent Create & Connect art session, we completed the Wartegg Drawing Completion Test, devised by psychologist Ehrig Wartegg in 1934. The idea is simple. A series of lines and shapes. You complete them. You reveal yourself. You can read more about it here.
What emerged from it, after sitting with the drawings for a while afterwards, was a need to write it all down, what were the drawings telling me about myself. The result is this poem. It is called The Aesthete (due to a different personality test) and explores my needs and identity.
Needs Analysis of The Aesthete
I need space, to process internally. I need emotional space: emotionally rich, but not emotionally loud. I need to express my emotional movement. I seek beauty. I seek new and different. I seek the wonders of the world around me.
I need clear and defined. I need reliability, clarity and low drama. I need emotional distance. I seek positivity.
I need focus, discipline, and a sense of forward movement. I need a system of structured freedom. I need fairness, rules, or strategy. I need a few rules I can break. Are you bored reading this yet? I seek art forms that reinforce my optimistic outlook.
I need well-matched. I need grounded expression and balance. I seek sound. I need to be quietly fulfilled. I seek colour.
I need peace, perspective and possibility. I need quiet happiness, nature and imperfection. I seek to wash away the dust of every day life.
I need real and alive. I seek real and alive. I feel real and alive.
The image attached to this post came later: a wall by the bus stop, a face emerging from the cracks, and written in someone else’s hand: En esta esquina, grita conmigo, que haya paz en el mundo. On this corner, shout with me, let there be peace in the world.
It felt like The Aesthete had found a wall to live on.
Words By Clarence Greenway for Heronbam Books.
Image created by Coast of Light.
