Since we started The Belfast Review just over a year ago, we've had the pleasure to showcase many new voices and works from Northern Ireland and beyond. Our readership has grown by leaps and bounds, and we're flattered to see other journals try to replicate what we do. But we're still growing – and one of the ways we want to grow the blog is by highlighting some of the creatives on our team.
To start things off, our Editor in Chief shares a personal essay and artwork, detailing her recovery from disability and the meaning behind her work.
In the age of media consumption, it's easy to take for granted the art that decorates every corner and pixel of our lives. Liked, shared, and scrolled past, we are encouraged to value them based on aesthetics alone – whether or not they 'grab' us in the moment – and not to pause and think, contemplate, and learn the stories behind their creation.
Let's take a peek behind the scenes at an artist's life. Fair warning, these colours can bleed.
NONFICTION
HANNA NIELSON
What's Behind a Painting: How I Healed Myself Through Art
Seven years ago, I was working in Los Angeles as a freelance documentary filmmaker, story editor, and art instructor – just to name a few of my jobs. It was all barely enough to cover the cost of my extortionate rent. When I added yet another job to the mix (bartending), it was only meant to be a 'survival job' that reliably covered my bills while I climbed the ladder of the film industry. It was at that job I suffered an accident that damaged all the tendons and nerves in my hands, wrists, and forearms. My life came to a crashing halt.
Before the injury, I'd never had to think how much I relied on the painless ability to grip, twist, and lift things. The never-thought-about weight of dishes, tea kettles, and litres of milk. Needless to say, it left me unable to perform any of my jobs. I couldn't hold a film camera, a paint brush, or even a computer mouse without setting off an avalanche of stabbing pains and tremors.
Daily life became an excruciating gauntlet. Buttoning my jeans, pushing a shopping trolley, holding a coffee cup, filling out endless forms for doctor's offices and insurance companies – everything was physical torture.
Having never had a serious medical condition before, I was suddenly plunged into the American health care system. A for-profit industry where your employer sponsors your health care. They are required to pay for treatment of work-related injuries – technically. The “care” must be approved by an insurance company, which determines just how unwell you are using a slew of metrics and advice from a panel of experts, none of whom are required to be doctors. At your most vulnerable, you are pitted against a leviathan of bureaucracy designed to save corporations their precious pennies.
I spent my days off driving across LA County, unable to turn the steering wheel without intense pain, dodging apocalyptic levels of traffic, all to attend appointments with lowest-bidder medical providers. They considered it their duty to doubt whether I was truly injured. Soft tissue damage isn't as obvious to detect and treat as broken bones, lacerations, or haemorrhages. The medical profession prefers the big, bloody, and obvious.
You quickly learn that having an injury that's delicate and subtle (while also being female) means that you are suspicious. Attention seeking, or pill seeking. It doesn't matter that you spent your entire adult life avoiding doctors. They truly believe you've been gagging for a chance to sit for hours in a dull medical office, to speak to a doctor you've never seen before for all of five minutes about your life changing condition before they rush off to the next patient. Clearly it beats going to Disneyland (which is cheaper by the minute than the average American doctor).
The medical professionals told me that recovery might never happen. It depended on my body's resilience. And because technically I was a middle aged woman, they told me not to expect much from my body. In fact, I should consider my current levels of pain as “the new normal.” They prescribed addiction-level medication, and I wasn't allowed to object. If I refused to endure the slurry of debilitating side effects, including but not limited to various bodily fluids erupting from every orifice and/or suicidal thoughts, I would be labeled an “uncooperative patient.” It would count as “refusing treatment” and the insurance company would have grounds to stop covering any future treatments.
As a teenager I made certain philosophical decisions about 'what if' scenarios I might face in my adult life. One of them included refusing to be an overly medicated woman, devoid of joy, endlessly watching telly in the living room. But now, a random doctor, employer, and insurance company knew what was best for me. I had to shut up about philosophy and accept that state of the art, designer pharmaceuticals would arrive by mail every two weeks. I shoved them in a drawer, unopened, more than enough to start my own pharmacy.
Meanwhile, I grappled with the absolute wreckage of my creative life. My hobbies and diversions, apart from watching movies or going for walks, all required the use of my hands. I couldn't cook from scratch or hold a book to read without pain. I had been juggling multiple creative gigs, building up my portfolio of film and acting jobs. In addition, I sold my artwork and handmade jewellery online. Suddenly I couldn't do any of it – not for love or money.
The main problem, and the reason my injury was so slow to heal, was that the tendons and nerves needed the stability of increased muscle tone – the very thing I began to lose because of the intense pain of using my hands. If I did nothing, nothing would change. The muscle tone would atrophy, leaving me forever weak at risk of re-injury. Yet, if I tried to rebuild muscle by traditional means (lifting weights and tension bands), I would damage the nerves and tendons further.
Determined to think outside the box, I met up with a Black actor friend of mine who had recently started an energy healing practise. We sat across a picnic table in a park on a warm February afternoon, with a traffic-scented California breeze blowing. He held his palms inches above mine, called upon his ancestral lineage, and the healing mother energy of Earth, and taught me to breathe through the pain. To think of the pain as just energy. An energy that could be lifted out of my hands and held at a distance. Then he told me to ask the pain what it was trying to tell me.
I hadn't expected the pain had anything to say. It was an accidental injury, nothing more. Nevertheless, I closed my eyes and 'listened.' Amid the tremors and sharp jags of pain riddling my palms and fingers – an answer whispered. I wasn't where I wanted to be. I didn't love a single thing about Southern California. The never ending traffic and the heat; the hustle; the “never enough” and “go big or go home” mentality. Being told over and over I wasn't thin/pretty/young/talented/rich or fill-in-the-blank enough to be an actor. As a 'gun for hire' filmmaker, I wasn't working on creative projects I loved. I was just taking pay cheques. My skills were useful, but I was ultimately replaceable, even to the people I thought of as friends. It was shocking the speed at which the phone stopped ringing as soon as something bad happened in my life.
'Where is the love?' my friend asked when I told him my revelation. 'Think of a place, a memory, that held the most love.'
'Ireland,' I said, my eyes still closed. A memory came: before the collapse of the Celtic Tiger drove me back to America in search of work, my best friend and I had travelled to Donegal for the regatta. An endless night filled with concerts, fair grounds, pubs, and house parties. Joining, losing, and re-joining a throng of people seeking only the pleasure of the moment. Amid the celebration, I felt somehow separate. Not truly belonging, though I acted otherwise. My friend Ryan knew the difference, and as the last party wound down just before dawn, we stood outside for a smoke – and he asked me what was wrong. Not just in that moment, but the first cause. It went back to my childhood, being born into a family where no one else was like me.
We began an epic heart to heart, walking through misty fields in the pre-dawn, and as some spur of the moment test, releasing our fears, we jumped into a river and followed it to the sea. Knee deep in Loch Swilly, we watched as the sun broke above the mountains. Bathed in lavender, rose, and gold, we marvelled like the first souls glimpsing the first sunrise over a new Earth. I told him the rocks at our feet were older than all our sorrows. Half drunk, equal parts ridiculous and epic, we lifted a small boulder from the surf. Mementos of Earth's first moments, and reminders that our lives were but a blink of the eye compared to the ocean of all Time. What if we could lay down our woes as easily as dropping the rock back into the tide? Would it feel like freedom? We tried it, looking like fools to the neighbours driving past. But in that moment, an abandoned piece of my soul came winging back to me like a happy, tear-stained child, lost no more.
'Where is the love in your life right now?' my healer friend asked, bringing my attention to the present. The answer wouldn't come. Returning to Ireland was out of reach. My friends were scattered over the globe, just trying to survive. After the healing session, I wandered back to my apartment. Was I living a life where there was no love? All whittled down to just striving and surviving?
That night I thought over the conundrum of my injury – and of healing. It's no secret that the human body can heal itself. It can heal itself faster than medication. But only if love plays a part.
Before the injury, I had been close to completing a novel that I hoped to submit to a competition. The project had been close to my heart for years, but I was discouraged from completing it during my MA Creative Writing course because it was literary fantasy, and the instructors were snobbish about genre. It was set in a time before Irish fairy folklore was the stuff of old wives' tales. The idea came to me as a teenager, but the concept gained focus when I moved to Ireland. Suddenly it lived and breathed, infused with the land and seasons, poetry and songs, everything I experienced and loved. During the years in California, it became a way of returning to that feeling of love.
If I accepted the grim prognosis from doctors, then it would never be finished. Snuffed out. Silenced. If I valued what my soul longed to bring into this world, I had to find a way to heal. The thought came to mind: What if I kept working on the novel? What if typing, even just for five minutes each day, could help slowly rebuild the muscle strength I needed?
When I suggested it to doctors, they told me it was impossible, or at least medically unproven, which to them was the same thing. They were intent on medicating the pain, and managing the side effects of said medication with more medication. Their aim wasn't to cure me, but to make me a permanent consumer of medical care. I decided I would try my experiment without them.
I consulted the one good physical therapist I knew about my plan. She agreed that very small amounts of typing, spread over a very long period of time could rebuild muscle and give the damaged tissues enough stability to heal. Doing too much would cause permanent damage, she warned. But doing too little or being inconsistent would have little result. She wasn't optimistic, mainly because it would require tenacity, iron willed determination, and years of slow, painful, consistent work.
So I started with just five minutes a day of typing, working on my novel. After a few minutes, the backs of my hands felt like they were on fire. My wrists and forearms were lanced with stabbing pains. Jittery, involuntary movements took over my fingers. Then the timer went off. I put away my laptop. Made a cup of herbal tea to fight the inflammation, and wrapped my limbs in a heat pack. The next day, I did it again. And again – everyday, for an entire year.
After one year, I could type up to one hour before the pain stopped me. After two years, I could type for a few hours. If I pushed past my limits, I would pay for it – spending the next day in too much pain to work. But it meant I could return to part time film editing and some production work. I didn't make the deadline for the novel competition, but that wasn't the point. I loved that book so much that I had to work on it every day. I wanted to visit that world and those characters, even for just five minutes – and my love of it literally strengthened my body, mind, and soul.
My manual dexterity had yet to return, however, even though my strength increased. I could not reliably paint, draw, or write my own name with anything approaching my previous skill. That was a constant defeat. Since my earliest years, I have been prolific at painting and drawing. As a teenager, I began earning as a professional artist. Now, the jars of paint brushes sat on my shelves collecting dust. Thinking that a deadline might inspire me, I joined an artists' collective. We planned to hold a 'pop up' art fair at a downtown pub. The inventory of my pre-injury creations would provide the bulk of my offerings – but I wanted to have new paintings to sell.
In my apartment one sweltering afternoon, I set up an easel with a canvas, paints, brushes. My 'think positive' outlook crumbled as soon as I tried to paint a simple line. Pain flared in my wrists. What I created looked awful. Defeat stared back at me. My hands were no longer able to create whatever I wanted. They had changed, changed utterly. It was the first time the anger hit me. I had lost an ability, an identity, a gift – all because of a thankless, minimum wage job!
Throwing aside the brush, I grabbed a handful of paint and smeared it across the canvas. With only my useless, throbbing hands, I tried to create – something, anything. I had to learn all over again how to paint. Except I wasn't painting like a child, with joy and discovery. I painted with fury, and punched all of my pain and anger and sorrow into that canvas.
The result was not elegant. But there was power in it: Dante, at the moment during The Inferno when he first glimpses Hell, and wavers between fear and faith. The moment before he decides he has strength enough to endure the journey, and the lessons his guide must teach him. It was a repainting on a larger scale of a watercolour I had painted a decade earlier.
Dante II, 2018. Acrylic on canvas, 18x20
Dante, 2007. Watercolour on paper, 5x7
Part of my Figures of the Underworld painting series of mythological figures, I chose characters poised at their lowest moment of crisis, nothing left to lose, before they embrace a small shred of hope and are transformed. I created the series while living in Belfast and learning about the legacy of the Troubles, my own family history, and the trials facing my contemporaries as the post-Troubles generation. The series began with a spontaneous painting in oil and acrylic, showing the god Prometheus at the moment when his chains disappear and the eagle has eviscerated him for the last time – realising he is truly free.
Prometheus II, 2007. Oil and acrylic on canvas, 27 x 34
While I painted, I wasn't aware what the result would be. It's part of my practice as an artist to sometimes use spontaneous painting as a kind of emotional release. But when I recognised Dante's outline among the flames, the heft of his working man's shoulders, I was grateful. It was like seeing an old friend. He had come to join me in that moment, facing the Hell of my changed body, my ruined life.
The new painting sold immediately, providing money I desperately needed. Symbolically and literally, I had fed myself by channeling my pain into art.
My ability to paint the way I'd been accustomed to was still out of reach, but I had discovered a new method. In between Covid lockdowns, I returned to Belfast. With more time to focus on my recovery, I set to work. As with typing, I chose small, daily goals. Using only finger painting, I created a series of miniature seascapes. Carefully, I tried a few small projects with brushwork. But I listened to the pain, stopped when it was too much, and focused more on easily accomplished daily goals that wouldn't discourage me.
Twilight Seascape, 2021. Acrylic on paper, 2x2 (published in The Apiary, 2022)
For the next few years, I had to deconstruct what I expected of myself as an artist, abandon perfectionism, and just keep trying. What I created didn't give me a deep sense of joy, but the fact I could do anything at all did. I wasn't creating a major work of art; I was creating the increased ability to create. The strength, flexibility, and endurance.
Visiting my mother's house during her illness, I came across my art portfolio from university. The effortless detail and strength of line floored me. I might never again create anything like those sketches, but even that I had to ignore. The doing was important; and in order to keep doing, I had to forgive myself the results.
Al Pacino as Serpico, 1998. Charcoal on paper, 8x12
A few months ago I felt the unmistakable inkling of inspiration. The urge to 'just create something.' I didn't know exactly what, but decided it should be abstract, as that is less taxing on my current abilities. I bought new watercolour paper, and utilised a spontaneous method. Without looking, I swirled a pencil over the paper. As I painted in the background, I scanned the shapes in the middle, looking for some kind of face or figure. There was no telling what the subject might be until suddenly the patchwork became clear - a face assembled within the random shapes. And I pounced, filling in more features.
This painting series is the first I've created since my injury using traditional drawing and painting skills that I thought I had lost – and indeed had lost for a time. I had no idea that I could achieve it; I was simply determined to try. It marks my rediscovery of joy in being able to create art. And as it progressed, I discovered that once again myth had infiltrated my work.
The whimsical abstract portraits turned out to be personalities from fairy tales and legends. I was delighted by each one's appearance, welcoming them like unexpected guests. Some took longer to reveal themselves. For weeks I was quite convinced I was painting either a wizard or a vagabond only to discover it was King Arthur. When I recognised who he was, and that his sorrowful gaze held all the pain I have kept hidden all these years, I wept.
It's difficult to describe the 'aha!' moments that occur in any art form when suddenly it all comes together – method, meaning, madness – into something far exceeding the sum of its parts. The art reveals itself to you, the artist. No longer a series of small accidents, it looks destined. Like there was an angel stood over your shoulder knowing exactly how it would all turn out, nudging you in the right direction.
In storytelling, this would be the final scene. The place in the screenplay just before “Fade Out” where meaning and message are best summed up with a striking image. Like the hero riding into the sunset. Life doesn't exactly give us those moments. We go on, sunset or not, to new adventures, new trials, new everything. “It ain't over till it's over,” as someone famously once said.
The only image I can leave you with is a little girl who was once a flurry of creative motion, twirling, singing, and dancing. For the sheer joy of being alive, she created works of art. Paintings, drawings, and stories flew from her limbs like exquisite petals, caught by winds. She created because she existed; she existed because she created. It was a fairytale and she never asked, “But why do I create?”
I can no longer take for granted the why. To have a creative gift comes with responsibility – to allow yourself to have a voice, and to share it with others. The power to create ispower. To create something from nothing, the act of art, is the closest we come to the divine. It's our spark of magic.
After my injury, I was told to settle for the loss of magic. To accept the permanence of pain. To exchange my independence for victimhood. No one cheered me on for refusing. Alone, I reached through the flames of disability and embraced my art – not knowing where it would lead. I only knew that I could not live without it. That simple faith, like a cup filled with elixir in a fairy tale, healed me. And instead of being silenced, I now have a story to share.
Robin Hood, 2024. Acrylic on paper, 11x14
Little Red Riding Hood, 2004. Acrylic on paper, 11x14
King Arthur, 2024. Acrylic on paper, 11x14
Never forget that art is the magical thing, if not the only thing, that can truly change us, and in changing us, save us - no matter what battles we may face.
ARTIST BIO
HANNA NIELSON is a freelance editor-writer-filmmaker in Belfast. MA Creative Writing (U Leeds); BA Cinema & Comparative Literature (U Iowa). Published in The Ogham Stone, The Honest Ulsterman, Roi Fainéant and more. She worked in Los Angeles as a documentary filmmaker, film editor, story editor, actor, and scriptwriter. Her scripts placed highly in Sundance Screenwriters Lab & Blue Cat Screenwriting Competition. She is currently querying two novels.
Art sales and editing services at Kofi.com/hannaswork
Socials: @hannaswork
SPECIAL THANKS: to the artist for trusting us with their work. And thanks to all of you readers for reading! Be sure to like, follow, and share.
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