Expressive Therapy Workshop Schedule

Masks: Adornment and Storytelling

Participants will learn a brief history of mask use and construction, appropriate adornment techniques, and performance aspects. Each week a new topic of persona will be explored while decorating various masks. Personal and fictionalized stories and narratives will be explored while refining a final mask-centric performance piece.

 

Knitting and Crochet as a Healing Medium

Participants will master the skills needed to experience the well-documented meditative benefits of knitting.  In addition, in an increasingly technical and disconnected world, it provides an opportunity to connect by sharing this 1200-year-old art form.

 

Collage and Mixed Media

Using a selection of colored and printed papers, acrylic paints, and drawing media, the participants will work with different visual creative forms of expression such as line, color, texture, shape, and symbols. Participants will explore thoughts, memories, emotions, and narratives related to the theme(s), inspired by guided discussion.

 

Guided Visual Journal

This workshop will guide participants in the development of a mixed media visual journal. Participants will utilize mixed media techniques, including collage materials, paint, and pens to complete journal art during a series of sessions. Sessions will also include development of personal image and text “banks.” Integration of personal written narratives or stories with color and form will be encouraged.

 

Painting as Meditation

This workshop will focus on painting as meditation, self-discovery, and emotional expression.  This course would work best as an 8-week offering. The main focus will be painting. Using acrylic on canvas no smaller than 18” x 24” in size, the painting will develop intuitively as a process. Development of the painting will be prompted by exercises for inquiry and development of “right brain” creativity. Guided meditation and writing will be used as well. Additional art mediums may include collage and/or drawing.

 

Nature Drawing – Saturday October 17 24 and November 7, 14

Participants will explore the use of items found in nature with which they can draw in ink on paper. The use of twigs, leaves, or even bird feathers dipped in ink to illustrate those very things by hand connects the artist to nature in ways that are fresh and invigorating Nature drawing of this type is a very simple, meditative act done with simple organic materials. Click here to see the flier for this workshop.