Art for Healing
Julie Cunningham
Exploring love...
A four hour creative workshop where you create a personal work about love.
1pm - 5pm Sunday 28th Feb 2016 on beautiful Comerong Island at the head of the Shoalhaven River where I have moved.
Call me on 0411 109 813 to book or email me from my contact page here.
$90 per person. Bring another person, partner or friend and its $160 for two. Concessions are available. Call me I want to make it possible for you.
No prior artistic training required.
Afternoon refreshments and all art materials provided.
Numbers are limited so secure your spot with a down payment of $ 40.
The Process:
Ideas will come to you as we view images from art and nature and we talk about them. We will be using a variety of easy mediums, on a thick gsm paper which can take pens, paint, patterns, symbols, photos, layering textures and the collaging of words and images. I will demonstrate some easy techniques which include finger painting. The body, eyes, heart, hands could be your visual map though we also look at other shapes which can be expressive of love you might want use. Or you might want to have your work begin with words or a quote. How flamboyant or subtle you are is up to you. In this, there are no rules, only guiding you if you wish and suggestions. Expression and exploring are the invitation. Its about finding whatever resonates and works for you and giving your self time to visually and imaginatively immerse into something so vital to our happiness, yet rarely explored in itself, this mystery with many faces that sustains us.
What to bring:
As it appeals to you - bring pictures of your loved ones, your good self, pets and/or of things that carry a happy emotional charge or attract you..either to inspire you or to collage. (Black and white images can work well.) A note book. Perhaps your partner? Or a friend. Finally and first, your curiosity!
Background to the idea:
February brings Valentine’s Day prompting us to thinking about love and romance. As two is the classic number of “I and thou”, the second month is an aligned time to focus on love, especially as its before we leap, then March into the the business year! :)
Its too easy though, with all the imagery and ideas focusing on couples to merge the two words - love and romance - and think if we haven’t found a partner we are without love.
Romance, while it can be delicious, is only one expression of love. As well as “falling into it”, we also give it and feel it towards more than one other, act from it, perhaps see through it, like a lense. How else can we think about it and express it, this mystery? As it nourishes us, how can we connect to it when not partnered? In loving what do we need to be reminded of? The Greeks have at least six words for love. How can art and nature expand our ideas about love?
The aim:
To have fun being creative and expressive and to celebrate and explore visual ways of expressing feeling, sensing, giving, receiving, imagining and thinking about love, in a personal work.
By focusing, visualizing and creating, this process can also help to grow in the kinds of love you desire.
The view from Comerong Island on the Shoalhaven River towards Kangaroo Valley.