by Klara Esau

For my multimodal element, I decided to paint three different yoga poses and how I feel when I do them. In my autoethnography, I talk heavily about how yoga has positively impacted my mental health, but just writing wasn’t enough to show my true emotions while doing yoga. Throughout my whole life, my mom has been very influential on what I do. She is an art teacher and a yoga instructor, so I have grown up to love it. Art has been a very big part of helping my mental health also, so getting to paint yoga poses is very exciting for me. In my pieces, I wanted to have bright colors and different patterns everywhere, because when I practice yoga, my mind blooms with new ideas and overall calmness. I also wanted to incorporate black and gray because of the negative thoughts that everyone gets and how it is completely normal.

In my process, first I sketched out a silhouette of a person in each yoga pose and then I did a design that went specifically with each pose. For Tree Pose, or Vrikshasana, I drew a tree coming out of the person’s hands. After I sketched everything out, I painted all the black and gray parts, then went in with different colors and made swirls, and other patterns. Finally, I went over everything with a black pen just to make it look less messy.

When I do yoga, I leave all of my negative thoughts and stress behind. When I step onto my mat, or onto the sand, I
let everything go, even if it is only for an hour. Doing this helps clear my mind and because of this, I am calm and filled with positivity and happiness. The bright colors in my pieces signify how I feel when I do yoga and how happy I am after. Painting these three pieces made me really think about how yoga had helped me throughout the years, and I want others to know that this can help them too.