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Global Network Blogs: Art Therapy with Beverley A'Court
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Art and Art Therapy in Sustainable Community
 Not so long ago, within living memory, poesis, poetic consciousness, and visual knowledge were highly respected. Every Scottish village would have had its Bard — poet and prophet, seer and songster, story keeper and teller — reflecting the life of the people and land back to themselves, contributing to local myth, practices and decisions. In Findhorn we are doing pretty well, with a wealth of skilful soul-singers in our midst. But still, in much of society at large, poetic consciousness plays second fiddle to rationalist-materialist thinking. Visual thinking is only slowly being reinstated as a valid form of cognition, with its own inherent, natural coherence. The findings of recent neuroscience, such as how events in the visual cortex influence the whole body and how ‘somatic markers’ influence supposedly ‘rational’ decision-making, are, by science’s own standards, hard to ignore. As are the testimonies of previously silent, stigmatised and marginalised people, many of whom are ‘visualisers’, now with more freedom, confidence and access to the media to speak.
So what has this to do with art therapy and community?
Many art therapists regard part of their work as remedial — reintroducing into daily, cultural life, practices which restore the vital ‘nutrients’ of creativity and imagination which have been lost, like vitamins and fibre in flour. In art therapy, and art-as-therapy, we rediscover and remember ancient modalities and forms of expression, representation and communication, once used spontaneously as children, but allowed to atrophy as adults.
Art is often experienced as therapeutic in a broad sense because many of us have neglected those aspects of body-mind that art awakens. Our ancestors would have spent many hours and months crafting things with their hands directly from nature’s raw materials and gaining much sensory and other learning from this.
 In art we can lose ourselves to find ourselves
Many life crises erupt in metaphoric thought, language and body symptoms, which can be actively engaged with through the arts. Given the opportunity, many who have grown mute, unable to find words for their experience, confused or overwhelmed by others’ words and concepts, find relief in artistic expression, insight into originating causes and freedom from symptoms, in the self-reflective, ego-transcending process of art-making.
We often, if not always, see ourselves, the world and others through the lens and filter of our own attitudes. Expressive art can reveal some of our seeing to us. Our marks carry the imprint of our movement, energy and feeling. In fine art craftsmanship is used to hone and refine the first raw expression of individual impulse, vision and emotion. In art therapy this rawness is itself precious material to be worked with.
So how to begin to share about art and art therapy’s place in, and potential contribution to, sustainable community living? I’d like to use this blog to share a simple home-spun art exercise each month and invite responses. After some months, there is a larger project we could all participate in, but we need to start gently… so here goes.
Who are we? Can we become more honest, more transparent to ourselves and others for the sake of harmony and solidarity in our community ventures?
* How might art help us by being a mirror for our selves?
* Am I who and what I say I am?
* Am I who I think, and tell myself and others, I am?
* Or am I both more and less than these?
* Am I in some kind of transition in my life? Or do I feel stuck, unable to move but longing to grow?
* How am I changing right now?
Beginning with Hands
 Handprints. Cover your hands with water-based brush or finger paint, or graphite, if you have graphite in powder or stick form available.
Make 2 prints, your hands may be separate on the sheet or overlapping or side by side making a third shape; bird, butterfly, rabbit…..or repeated to make a pattern.
Use recycled paper if you can — the inside of brown paper packaging/bags is good, or cardboard, or a double thickness of newsprint — you won’t see the black print after a while and won’t have to overcome the sometimes intimidating prospect of a pristine sheet of white paper.
Contemplate the difference between the 2 hand prints. Play at being palm reader — what do you see? A wide river here, an elk head there? Three bent twigs? A bird?
When dry, or not, decorate both hands following your impulses and intuitions. Alternatively, work with more conscious intention, focussing on expressing who you are, your gifts, skills, passions, character, aspirations…
Take time to look carefully at the final result. Allow your creations to look back at you, to talk to you, revealing their secrets.
You can do this with a friend, partner or family members, adults and children together, sharing afterwards. Be sure to leave enough time to de-brief and say anything that might need saying.
So, for 2-4 people you might need 20-40 minutes to print and paint plus 20-40 minutes to share. Find what works for you. Young children may need less time. If you only have a little time do it quickly, in a spirit of spontaneity, surprise and play.
Display idea: cut out the hands and paste them up a staircase or make a collage.
You are invited to share your learning
* How did you do it?
* Was it fun, interesting?
* Did you discover anything about yourself? About your partner, family members or colleagues?
If you would like to share your learning and ideas, passion and creativity, please visit our forum: http://www.findhorn.org/forums and contribute to the thread, Art Therapy with Beverley A'Court. You'll need to register with a username and password first, then click on the link to the private Global Network forum.
Happy painting!
Beverley A'Court
Findhorn
April 2008
To find out more about Beverley and her work
Visit: www.art-therapy-uk.net
Walk in Beauty
‘I work as I walk, not knowing what I might find...’ Geoff Yeomans, Painter - from catalogue notes to his exhibitions since 1989
Everywhere there is talk about our carbon footprints. And talk about organic food, farming, clothing, paint… but much less talk – save for a few like the Slow Food Movement and Satish Kumar – about organic time; the time it takes a tree to germinate and grow, fruit to ripen, a wounded heart or broken bone to heal.
Trying to keep up with the speed of the technology we’ve created, we eat, converse and hold meetings on the hoof and we often want ‘instant’ art. School art lessons are often so contracted that a formulaic ‘template’ provided by the teacher has replaced experience of an authentic creative process – with its surprising ups and downs, disturbing voids, intellectual challenges and ecstasies.
Try some instant image making – wet a piece of thick absorbent paper with a sponge, stretch, then drip thin water colour paint onto it – or food colouring if you don’t have paint - and watch, as clouds, veins, forests appear... dream.
Art making can be instant; a spontaneous flow of gesture leaving expressive marks, though often the best of this follows years of devoted learning to open eyes, heart, muscle and mind. Calligraphy, for example.
Equally, art takes time; preparation of water, paper, paint, looking, feeling, allowing marks, forms and images to arrive, interact and transform. Paintings, like novels, often have their own time and can't be hurried. The sense of something arriving, something unresolved on the canvas, a character developing, is a physical sensation for many artists.
So art making is a wonderful medium for reconnecting with organic time. When we run through life we miss beauty - the sights, smells and touches of nature that nourish us. We go hungry amidst plenty. Art practice can slow us down and speed us up, play us like an instrument, as we find our own rhythm and timing, and leave us feeling deeply nourished.
This month we could focus on our feet, newly liberated into summer sandals and soft grass.
Our Footprint - Activity
Draw around your bare feet on a sheet of paper or an inch flat rolled slab of clay. Then ‘customise’ them further – decorate them to express yourself. You can simply play, following intuitive impulses as you choose colours, marks etc. or you can float questions in your mind, without seeking answers, and let your imagination respond creatively:
* How do your feet feel from the inside?
* How do you feel towards your feet? You can celebrate by beautifying them with colours, patterns…
* How and where we stand also has its seasons; are your feet firmly planted? Or are you currently uprooted, on the move, barely touching the ground?
* Do you feel yourself to be on a path? Or do you feel lost, at a fork in the path?
* How is the ground under your feet?
A simple art activity like this can be a window into ourself:
* How are we creating our imaginal world?
* How are we perceiving the world and responding to it? How is our place in the world?
* How is the ground where you stand, walk, your environment? How does your footprint influence it? What is your social & spiritual footprint?' What radiates from your footprint?
Walk in Beauty, as the Navajo say.
Beverley A'Court
Findhorn
June 2008
To find out more about Beverley and her work
Visit: www.art-therapy-uk.net
Mandalas – sacred circles
Summer is for many the season to be outdoors painting and drawing. Art often begins with looking and touching – inside ourselves for feelings, impulses, images and outside for inspiration, beauty, colour, and subjects… wherever calls us, stirs a creative response.
In this season we can enjoy very simple beginnings in creativity – by responding to mandalas, circular radial forms everywhere in nature: Daisies and dandelions, roses and mid-day sun, herbs and young oaks – all growing outwards and upwards in radial Fibonacci spirals.
Outside – with a tiny hard-back sketch book and colours – sit amongst flowers and make mandalas of all kinds in response to the plant life around you. How are you like a mandala?
Mandala-Quest
This is fun to do with children of all ages. How many can you find in nature? The smallest? The largest? The most colourful? Find one you like and use it as the starting point for a picture of your own.
This simple form, used by cultures across the world to express the seemingly layered human self, the meditation process, the spiral journey of life and the architecture of sacred buildings is a helpful basis for our self-exploration.
 Self as Mandala
For self expression we can take this structure and process and draw inwards towards our self, bringing our attention gently inwards to quieten, or outwards – reaching into the wider world to connect. Try both of these on large, non-precious paper to discover the different feeling qualities of each.
Many books and workshops now exist to help us play with mandalas – but without any of these just try your own.
Make a circle on a sheet of paper and mark the centre point.
Then here are 2 strategies to try:
1. Beginning somewhere on the circumference, draw or paint using strokes flowing in towards the centre – imagine drawing into your life and yourself whatever you need, long for and desire for your health and happiness. Choose colours and media to harmonise with this.
Combine this with mindfulness of your breathing, focussing on the qualities of the in-breath.
2. Beginning at the centre, draw or paint in an outwards direction, towards the periphery, using strokes that move away from your centre as if your own self extended out in to the world. Imagine sharing your gifts or sharing and releasing your pains, sorrows, burdens into the greater world. Imagine reaching out to meet, connect, touch and experience dynamic interactions. Imagine receiving playfulness, being truly drawn out of yourself in spontaneity. Re-connect with distant friends, or lost friends.
Combine this with mindfulness of your breathing, focussing on the qualities of the out-breath.
This can be a simply but powerfully cathartic exercise. Good for releasing and centering after a busy day at work or a stressful love affair.
With awareness focussed gently on both in-breath and out-breath, using strokes in both directions – notice your own rhythm and flow of feeling.
Let yourself go outside the circumference, beyond the boundary. Notice what you feel. Imagine yourself spacious, unbounded, able to connect with every part of life. How does it feel to be so open?
Experiment with mandalas to find and express just the amount of openness, permeability and protective, boundariedness you feel is most comfortable.
How does it look?
What, if anything, would you like to change?
Make mandalas to try different forms of yourself.
Size isn’t everything. Making a tiny mandala can be an intense form of expression: tiny mandalas can be exquisitely beautiful and surprisingly intense and powerful, a visible concentration of energy. A lovely mini-activity for small children. A meditation for adults.
Make a Mandala Diary – make a daily mandala in response to your local nature and your changing moods and life.
Invitation to Join Our Discussion Forum
Do please share your experiences and discoveries on the forum – you may inspire someone else and pick up a new idea to try: http://www.findhorn.org/forums and contribute to the thread, Art Therapy. You'll need to register with a username and password first, then click on the link to the private Global Network forum.
Some food for thought to share on the forum:
Are you doing these monthly exercises?
How are you are finding them?
What effects have you noticed?
I hope we can try something as a group later this year...
Beverley A'Court
Findhorn
August 2008
To find out more about Beverley and her work
Visit: www.art-therapy-uk.net
Golden Wheel Mandala
Golden Wheel (detail) 75x100cms - a high summer painting.
This image, of a huge golden wheel dissolving into the sky-space around it, arrived in a dream and kept pressing itself insistently on my mind.
Some dream images seem to come with the instruction 'paint me'. I often wonder what this is. Perhaps it's the psyche's way of making sure we pay sufficient attention to an image to receive its message.
I worked on this picture for 5 days non-stop, obsessively painting all the tiny circular dots.
Harvest Time in Our Garden of Images
Einstein, like many scientists, said that all scientific theories begin in the imagination.
I am writing this on ‘big bang’ day – as scientists in Switzerland prepare to collide protons at light speed - to mimic our universe’s (hypothesised) first moments. What’s grabbing my attention is the imagery; ‘big bang’…’dark matter’…’the god particle’… metaphors of mystery and imagination, evocative of ancient creation myths.
This experiment is the culmination of 30 + years’ work for some of the scientists and engineers from over 100 nations, all captivated by mystery – What are we? Where did we come from? What will become of our universe? Any result will seed new questions and research.
And here it’s harvest time; golden bales patterning the landscape and trees like dark green fire. So for us exploring our lives and awareness through art, we can use art to contemplate our own ‘harvest’ – what is ripening for us now? What dreams or projects are coming to fruition? What beauty can we take to heart from our year so far, to enrich and sustain ourselves?
In a sense art making is often like the ‘harvest’ phase of a longer process, the cycle of seed, dormancy, germination, growth and ripening into form. Some art making can feel like scratching hopelessly at dry earth, preparing the seed bed, or looking for clean water, clearing out drains and digging irrigation channels. Personally I’m resting following our successful Observer Effect 08 conference here – but can feel the seeds of new paintings germinating. Meanwhile I don’t force art work, don’t call it ‘artist’s block’ but return to nature, harvesting vegetables, pruning trees for next year’s fruit. At most I draw broad beans, onions, play with cabbage colours.
This Month’s activity: Harvest Mandala
Suggestions:
* you may enjoy looking at old folk art and craft traditions and play with creating your own version to celebrate and express gratitude for the wealth of your life – material and spiritual
Or
* perhaps make a large family or work group harvest mandala, to honour personal and group achievements
Or
* simply return to gesture and free mark making, as you trust whatever appears to be some aspect of your current ‘harvest’.
You can experiment with deepening the focus and intentionality of your art making by taking a few minutes to meditate before starting. The simple mantra – ‘my harvest’ may loosen remembrance of good things, losses, lessons and appreciations. Remember to relax your mind and loosen your grasp on any images that arise, before you actually start to draw.
If you tell yourself you have artist’s block - stop! Drop into where you are right now, honestly, without cosmetic adjustments. This is it, you are the cosmos, center and periphery. Like a curious scientific researcher ask; How is my world? Where are there ripe fruits? Where are seeds lying dormant, or on rough, untended ground? Where am I neglecting my ‘garden’? What are my successes, small and great?
Give yourself a few minutes, 1, 3, 5… to make marks with simple materials. Then just look.
Do these marks and images help you to see anything new about how you are?
Where you might be in the cycle of creativity?
Of course our many activities often ‘ripen’ at different times but I’ve observed that it sometimes helps to use this metaphor from nature to allow ourselves to live and work rhythmically, not always in active output-harvest mode.
We may need dormancy or simple repetitive task while seeds of new ventures germinate.
If you tell yourself you have artist’s block, perhaps you are not respecting some natural phase or maybe there’s a deeper reason.. which can be the subject of another blog.
Invitation to Join Our Discussion Forum
Do please share your experiences and discoveries on the forum – you may inspire someone else and pick up a new idea to try: http://www.findhorn.org/forums and contribute to the thread, Art Therapy. You'll need to register with a username and password first, then click on the link to the private Global Network forum.
Beverley A'Court
Findhorn
September 2008
To find out more about Beverley and her work
Visit: www.art-therapy-uk.net
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