From Art to Empowerment

5. Your Twelve-Week Workshop

This workshop will provide you with the tools to explore and express the personal story you want to visually tell in your own way. In this art workbook, you will learn how to explore your inner world, the ways you experience life, and how to give expression to your story, your feelings, and your beliefs about life in visual art. During this workshop, you will be immersed into a deep process of communicating with the self and acquiring self-knowledge through artistic expression, because you will work with an issue of personal interest. This could be an issue you feel passionate about, an issue that makes your heart beat faster, or maybe a verb or a quality of life, like an emotion. For instance, women in my workshops have worked on “Blooming,” “Nurturing,” “Freedom,” “Fear for the Empty Nest,” “Anger,” “Addiction,” “Feelings of Women,” “Being under the Shadow,” and “Getting Old.” The assignments offered to you each session, will encourage you to recall images from memories, feelings, and dreams and to find personal metaphors. They will lead you to research different sides of yourself.

You can travel around in your inner world, the world of your thoughts and imagination, by surfing on your own “Inner-Net”. How does that work? Well, it works just like the regular Internet, but you have to work from your imagination! By imagining that you write a specific word (or maybe a sentence) on your “personal Google bar” (on the imaginary screen that is linked with your imagination) and pressing Enter, you will be able to enter your imagination, the library of your personal images. Imagine you type in your personal Google bar “school.” After pressing Enter, everything you know and remember about school appears in front of your inner eye, and you “see” all the images about school you can imagine in your imagination: what a school is, what kinds of schools you know of, where you went to school, memories of being in school, people who were with you in school, and more. By using this unique technique to unlock your imagination, you can discover your personal world of images and their related feelings, memories, dreams, metaphors, and colors. You will realize how precious, rich, and valuable your own life experiences are as material for inspired personal works of art, made with your own ideas and images. You will go through the process of becoming an artist like real artists do and enjoy discovering and expressing who you are and what you want to say in your own way.

Except for your own life experiences, you need the tools and skills to use these life experiences as inspiration to become an artist. That is what this workshop will be about. It will teach you in a practical and revealing way all you need to know about the artistic process. You will develop artistic skill and visual ability, which includes the development of the inner eye, the imagination. You will learn how to tap into your personal artistic sources using visualization and imagination techniques, which will increase your artistic and visual sensitivity. Working with collage, mixed media, and paint gives this workshop the possibility to visualize your own narrative in a free and exploratory way. You will learn how to use your own life experiences as sources of inspired art making and to distill from these your own images and personal symbols. The focus will be on the artistic process, not on the end result. Specific exercises will help you to use your imagination and help you visualize the story you want to tell.

In this art workbook you will get to know a method based on the activation of this most important aspect of art making: the imagination. Because imagination blends thinking, feeling, and fantasizing, this method is called “Visualizing Words.” Inspired by the Socratic method of establishing a dialogue with oneself based on questions, each session of the workshop starts by asking yourself questions. Imagine the issue of personal interest you feel passionate about is “Feelings of Women.” By asking yourself questions, you start writing. Tina wrote the following in her artist journal.

For me, the metaphor for my issue “Feelings of Women” is the sea. Images I see are: calm, beauty, vastness, serenity, storm, lightning, anger, danger, fear, always something new, wealth on the bottom of the sea, the waves playing with the air, playing with the sun. The color for “Feelings of Women” is red. I would never choose that color for a blouse … but for me it is tightly tied to woman. It is blood, life, birth. It is the heart. It is passion, affection, and love. It is pain and screams. It is fear and death.

From Talking to Imagining

When you are with your friends, you probably talk about yourself, your life, and your feelings. One step further would be to concentrate on the images you see behind the words you use to tell your story. For instance, have you ever asked yourself, “If I want to be an artist, what image do I see in my imagination? What kind of artist am I? Where am I working? What do I make?” You need to be self-reflective and ask yourself many questions in order to enter your personal imaginary Wonderland and become acquainted with visualization. For instance, if you think “empty nest,” which images do you see? What do you feel about these images? By asking yourself many questions, you can go deeper into your personal experience of a specific word. “Freedom for me is a bird flying,” said one student. I asked, “What kind of bird? Where is it? What is it doing?” She then described a seagull flying high above the sea, the sun reflecting on the waves. She said the seagull was using the wind to fly and didn’t get tired flapping its wings. It was far away from the city, near a coastline with dunes. She paused for a second and then added, “I guess being free implies being alone, but it’s a happy feeling.”

Linking writing about a personal issue that interests you with visualization happens in session one. In subsequent sessions, you will explore your personal issue by finding images having to do with metaphors, exploring your memories, feelings, colors, dreams or nightmares, and your spirituality. By constantly going deeper into your imagination and practicing thinking words and seeing images by using your personal Inner-Net to enter your imagination, your art making will develop and your artistic voice will come to life. Visualizing what you think, what you imagine, and what you feel without the need to have a discussion about the why is a fantastic way to start an exploration of the self, to become conscious of the value of subjective experiences, and to discover personal artistic voice.