Expressive Therapy
Art washes away from the soul the dust of every day life
- Pablo Picasso
What is Art Therapy?
The colors, textures, and emotional tone in a painting that reflects shades of our desire, loneliness, rage, despair, passion, grief, shame, doubt.
The song that cracks a facade, melts a couple out of a cold war and into tenderness and a return to appreciation.
A child’s self-portrait that unapologetically fills the entire space of a page and captures her power, her delight, her beautiful perspective. An offering of how she experiences the world and how we can support her growth.
The process of centering clay, in spite of a chaotic outer world. The internal process of centering, acceptance, the faith of moving forward despite the cracks and doubted decisions. The leap of faith from clay to greenware to glazing, and dreaming of what will come out of the final firing. The satisfaction or grief of a shattered pot, the letting go. Beginning again.
The characters we follow through their hero’s journeys, Odysseus, Dorothy, Luke, Katniss, Hermione, Persephone. The symbols, the poems, the images which animate our hearts.
Sometimes talk therapy misses the mark. Sometimes the only way into our hearts or out of the dark night of the soul, is to get creative. Enter the process of Art Therapy.
How does it work?
Materials are endless:
crayons, markers, pens, sharpies, pencils, watercolor pencils, chalk pastels, conte crayon, oil pastels,acrylic, watercolor, oil paint, textiles, yarns, beading, doll-making, canvases, large scale canvases, treasure boxes, shadow boxes, masks, clay, poetry, collage, crafting & creation limited only by imagination.
Art-making celebrates memories, it conjures the dreams we long to pull into our daily lives.
Art can be crafting, it can be ritual, it can be play.
Art can be destroyed and made again in new ways, or be released forever.
Why Art Therapy?
The art we love is ten steps ahead of us, leading the way deeper into self-awareness, onto the hero’s path.
The symbols we love reflect back who we are, what we love, what we resist. Life itself.
You don’t have to consider yourself an artist or a performer to appreciate life through symbols, images, language, and music. Perhaps creating things is already a way of living for you, and you’d like to deepen your knowledge of yourself by doing it in another way, or adjunctive with other types of treatment modalities.
Forget my interpretations or anyone else’s, for that matter.
Let the art you love show you who you are and what your life can become.
Let the art offer your most tender mistakes and dreams.
Let the beauty we love be what we do.
There are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground.
-Rumi
