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Imagine With Art Newsletter
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I welcome your comments!
susan@imaginewithart.com
707-824-8163
Table of Contents:
Workshops
Art as Healing
Art Play Technique
Muse Book
Hot Blog
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 Dear Friends,
I was just eating lunch in the garden when I switched from the such-a-busy-day mental channel to the sensory here-and-now. It was a hawk soaring right above me and calling out that roused me. And suddenly the air was filled with sound and movement - buzzing honey bees, rumbling "bumblers", swooping swallows, floating butterflies, swirling gnats, leaping lizards. . .Honestly, in a flash I was a participant in a dizzying carnival of sound and movement, which continues now as I write.
How easy it is in springtime to switch the channels into this present moment, sensory collage of right hemispheric experience. Lately I've been studying and contemplating this state of mind and how it precipitates healing on not just the mental, but emotional, physical and spiritual levels as well. I'll offer some more thoughts about this along with hints about how to access the creative, healing response through art expression.
After all, it isn't always springtime in the garden.
Cheers,
Susan
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Imagine With Art Workshops
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Barnyard Sketching
Put on your straw hat and pack your sketchbook and watercolors for a day of sketching the richly plumed chickens and friendly goats in the magical garden sanctuary of the Rosa and Thorn. Instruction in quick capture sketching with pen and loose watercolor applications will embolden your sketches and bring freshness and movement to the page!
Date: One day, either Saturday, May 22, or Sunday May 23(only two spaces left!)
Time: 10am-5pm
Location: The Rose and Thorn gift shop/garden/barnyard extraordinaire!
10050 Bodega Highway, 3 miles west of Sebastopol, CA
Cost: $80
To register email Susan
Travel Sketchbooking
Join me for a weekend at the beautiful oceanside town of Gualala on the north coast! Lodgings of all kinds available nearby.
Learn to make painting so portable that you can do it on a hike, in the woods, at the beach or around town, capturing your unique impressions in a color sketchbook. Using pen and watercolors which fit in a purse or pack, you will create your own captivating color sketchbook. The result?
A new way to relate to visual experience and record it with your own personal reaction.
Drawing warm ups, watercolor painting technique, and collage and textures will be demonstrated with ample time to practice the new skills around town.
Date: June 26, 27
Time: 10am-4:30pm
Location: Gualala Arts, Gualala, CA
Cost: $150 members, $175 non-members
To register go to www.gualalaarts.org or call 707-884-1138
Free the Creative Spirit Retreat 
The weekend features a unique interplay of instruction in water media and collage techniques, art journaling and written word with meditation/contemplation to quiet the mind and summon the Muse, and music and gentle movement to engage the body in creative expression.
Date: July 17, 18
Time: 10am-5pm
Location: Bennett Peak Ranch, Santa Rosa, CA
Cost: $195 includes lunch and some materials
To register email Susan.
Ask for a list of local accommodations if you are coming from a distance!
A new 6-month series of monthly Muse groups will begin the first weekend in September! More information available on my website.
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Art as Healing
"Art heals you, art heals others, and art heals the earth. Each of us has within us an inner artist and an inner healer. The inner artist is the part of us that is passionately creative, that feels love, that feels connected to everything around us. . . Art helps you conquer disease by freeing your inner healer to work at its optimum." -Michael Samuels, MD from the book Creative Healing
The neurophysiologists who study the brain have found that art, prayer and healing have the same brain wave patterns. In other words, our brains are wired for a healing response to art! Images held in the right brain activate the hypothalamus which in turn activates the autonomic nervous system, which balances and maintains every aspect of our body.
Another way to say this is that art takes us into our inner world, the place of imagery and emotion, of feelings and visions, and this is the source of our healing. Expressive arts are also energizing, because we are connecting up with a source of creative options and greater energy than we have access to in our habitual life patterns. Our perception of pain changes and can cease to exist when we enter this state of inner absorption in art making. My experience is that the big "problems" of my life are put in perspective when they go down on the paper and I draw on the humor and wisdom which is our natural inheritance.
These are some of the many reasons that Shawna Swetech, RN and I teamed up to teach a workshop for nurses last month, titled Wellness Through Art Expression.
Eleven nurses from various hospital, clinic and educational settings attended this daylong workshop and had their own direct experiences of healing by practicing the expressive techniques of art play, writing, and sharing their heart felt stories. There were some amazing personal breakthroughs! as well as shared enthusiasm about continuing these practices in their personal lives to deal with the stresses of a very challenging profession, as well as trying out ways to share art with their clients.
As always happens, the teachers learned as much as the students about this amazing practice of transformation. Shawna went off to team up with others and work on transforming her hospital setting into a more "artfully healing" environment, and I have a much greater awareness of the basic value of the arts, not as simply entertainment or even cultural enrichment, but as crucial to our health as a species!
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Art Play Technique: Image Transfer
One method for transferring a photographic image to your page is to make a transparency of it using clear contact paper. Make a (laser or toner) copy of it in black-and-white or color, and press it, ink side down, on the sticky side of clear contact paper.
Soak it in water for a few minutes. Gently rub the paper pulp off the back. You will get a transparency of the image to glue onto your paper.
This works best over an under-painting of color, which will show through your picture, giving it depth and mystery. Then you can paint more detail on top as well. The irregularities in the transfer process contribute to its appeal.Excerpted from my book Conversations With the Muse: The Art Journal as Inner Guide.
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Conversations With The Muse: The Art Journal As Inner Guideby Susan CornelisIn this book I share my art journals and the personal revelation and healing which is cultivated through this process. The reader is guided through the steps including: accessing a quiet state of mind, translating inner feelings and visions
to paper, employing a wide array of painting and collage techniques,
and writing expressively to reap vibrant meaning from the images
appearing in this spontaneous manner. The colorful images, materials,
techniques, and written words combine for a rich feast for the
imagination.
You may preview the book on blurb.com and see the first 10 pages. Softcover and hardcover versions are also available directly from the Blurb bookstore.
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Hot Blog!
Jana's Journal and Sketchbook blog never fails to amuse and delight me. She lives her art and arts her life! And she takes her sketchbook with her everywhere - which is what many of us say we're planning to do - but she really does it! You'll get an honest "inside" look at the process of learning to do art (she also teaches it!) and even humorous illustrations, like about losing weight! |
That's it for now. Please visit me on my Art and Sketchbook blog for my latest images and art/life ramblings. And happy adventuring in art!
Cheers,
Susan
Susan Cornelis
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