Operators are Standing By Call Now!

I recently received a marketing newsletter that informed me the best way to get people to open my newsletter is to have a subject line that indicates a time-limited offer. I thought "One Week Only!" and then realized art therapy is not really time limited. Is there really such a rush to come in for art therapy as that?

In another informative "here's how you do it" article I read that the way to wealth is to offer something online that people coming to my site can immediately purchase and download. What a genius of an idea! Instant gratification!

Believe me, I am trying to come up with just the right thing. I'm thinking of parenting advice. After all, I am an expert, having brought three children safely to productive adulthood. But honestly, I am just like a million other mothers in that way. My children are brilliant and hard working mostly because of how they came into the world. They are a result of a million experiences of which I was not an integral part. I doubt my parenting advice and methods will teach anything new. Besides, I learned most of it after they were grown up and I returned to school. It's amazing I raised such successful kids prior to my expensive education.

No, I don't want to write a book. It's a lot of work. I don't even want to write a pamphlet or an article.

Oh, then I had a wonderful inspiration. I will publish a sketchbook. That you can purchase and download from my website! Yes, a book of blank pages is just the thing! (And if you want a larger sketchbook, please load your printing tray with "14 x 11" paper.)

I wonder how much it should cost...

"Art Time"

What is the difference between art education and art therapy? Where does one stop and the other begin? My own experience as a potter frequently gives me the experience of being out-of-time, especially while I work on the potter's wheel. In one of the art therapy discussion groups I belong to the following conversation thread has developed. One contributor to the conversation suggests that in regard to a figure drawing class:
As things progress, if the teacher has done her job, then you enter "art time" where time seems to disappear, the model is now an object of undulating curves, infinite shading, the meeting of light and dark contrasts all of which have to be translated into the restraints of charcoal on paper. It is hardly an all right brain thing, but more a collaboration of both hemispheres of the brain in conjunction with higher and lower brain functions.

I recognize that state of being~doing, which I find is very difficult for many to describe. In that state, where Jungian Dr. Marion Woodman says, "The painting paints the painter," we seem to leave "ordinary time" which the Greeks called "chronos" and enter the time state of "kairos" which is often called sacred time, by those same Greeks... It may be a time-less state, where transformation is possible, for the strictures of reality may be loosened, by the setting aside of the reality-based ego, which for some of our patients has been formed as a limited and restrictive critical ego function.

Now I ask my readers: what is your experience of "losing time" while engaged in art (or music) making?

Cabin Fever

What an interesting time of year. While still cold and snowy in much of the country with cloudy, gray skies, the days are growing longer and brighter. Among days of bitter wind and frigid temperatures, we can experience random days of sunlight and even warmth that remind us spring is just around the corner.
Either we accept and embrace this chilly time and wile away the hours sipping hot cocoa, reading or watching movies while enjoying a respite from outdoor responsibilities like mowing the grass and pulling weeds. Or...we grow anxious.
It is subtle at first. Then, the sensation of being confined leads to pacing and a lack of focus. Minutes seem like hours, and we spend more of them peering through slits in curtains drawn to keep the cold at bay. We hope for a glimpse of green grass or crocus buds peaking through the dingy snow.
Diagnosis? Cabin fever. Treatment? Friends and activities.
Occupy your head and hands with an exciting new project in a social setting. Make the most of this time "trapped" indoors by trying a new craft. Take a class, join a group or attend a social craft event at a store, café or friend’s house.
Even a few hours spent creatively with loved ones can bring a little sunshine into your day and chase away winter blahs.
With thanks to all the inspirational art therapists out there.

The Mini Saga

I learned a wonderful new art form from the book by Daniel Pink, "A Whole New Mind." It's called the “Mini Saga.” The mini saga consists of 50 words - no more, no less, - that tell a story from start to finish. Here’s one I wrote recently.

And Forever
By ones and twos they grow up and move away. That’s the way of children. They take your heart and run with it. We think there’s all the time in the world, but it isn’t so. From now on it’s only visits. Brief, poignant, and infrequent. I miss them terribly.

Solstice and Hope

I’m watching the snow outside through the window from inside on the couch. I’m spending the day in my bathrobe as I recover from a virus. It happens to be Friday, my day off, and it’s snowing like crazy here. If I felt better I might bundle up and go outside to enjoy the experience. “Enjoy” is the wrong word. I don’t like being cold. It brings up a lot of sad feelings from the past. Winter in general is a hard time for me with its darkness.
2 Days Later… I’m starting to think about hope. My health has returned and some energy came with it. The sun is peeking through the clouds and reflecting brightly off the snow left behind by the past week’s weather. Still friggin cold out there, but there are moments of beauty – especially if you are out of the wind.
It gives me hope. I recently had the pleasure of attending a speaking engagement by Evan Handler. You may remember him as the bald, Jewish love interest of Miranda in the series, “Sex in the City.” Turns out he is a cancer survivor and also a fine author as well. (See: “Time on Fire" and “It’s Only Temporary”). He was on a book tour and came to Ann Arbor as part of it. I have read his first book and I’m on the waiting list for the second one from the library.
One of the notions I came away with from his talk was this: There is no such thing as false hope. Mr. Handler claims that false hope is an oxymoron. Handler was frequently being admonished by his doctors against false hope. He had a type of leukemia that at the time had a 90% fatality rate. Mr. Handler understood this to mean that a full 10% of people with his disease would be cured! In his description of the experience it seemed as if the doctors were trying to protect their own feelings, rather than those of their patients. The doctors had lost many patients. Evan Handler’s doctors expected their patients to die. It was hard for them to retain hope for individual patients in their care.

I can’t solve the mortgage crisis alone or rescue the auto companies in Detroit – though my tax dollars will be earmarked to this end for the foreseeable future. But I hope all will be well in the financial world. I hope the stock market stabilizes and grows again. I hope our work continues to joyfully sustain us. I hope our health stays solid.
Hope is defined by Webster’s Seventh New Collegiate Dictionary (mine from high school) as “desire with the expectation of fulfillment.”
My hope looks like this: We will have sunny days again. The days will get longer from now till late June. At the solstice I am reminded that natural light really does affect my mood. I need and want more of it. Hope is back with tilted axis of the earth in its orbit.

World Class

I am lucky enough to live near a city with a world class art museum. The Detroit Institute of Arts. I’ve been going to the DIA since I was a baby. It was a place my mother loved to visit and she would sometimes take me. My mother was in high school when Diego Rivera was painting his famous “Industry” murals in the DIA courtyard. She watched him at work on the scaffolding after school.

The DIA became a second home to me. I hung out there a lot as an adolescent. I was an art student at Cass Tech, and the Art Institute enriched my studies as much as it comforted me with its familiar sights, sounds, smells, lights, and shadows. Returning to the DIA now comforts me just as much.

My favorite things today included a wonderful black and white photograph of Andy Warhol visiting Detroit. I saw photos by Andre Kertesz and Henri Cartier-Bresson. There is currently a special exhibition, “From Monet to Dali,” from the collection of the Cleveland Museum of Art. Included were some truly luminous Monet paintings. Reproductions don’t do justice to the light captured by Monet. I could hear the sounds and feel the air and smell the summer captured in his paintings. They felt alive to me. Although I was surrounded by people, even jostled at times, it felt like I was the only one there. Everything fell away around me when I stood before these thrilling works.

It was a wonderful day. I love visiting the Detroit Institute of Arts.

Whole Mind

From another book about the brain, “A Whole New Mind,” by Daniel H. Pink, I have culled the following: Roger W. Sperry (Cal Tech professor, Nobel Prize winner in medicine) reshaped our understanding of our brains. In the 1950s Sperry studied patients that had had surgery separating their brain hemispheres (as a treatment for epilepsy). He discovered that the established hemispheric dominance/subordinance theory of the brain was flawed. Yes, our brains are separated into two halves. But as he put it, “The so-called subordinate or minor hemisphere, which we had formerly supposed to be illiterate and mentally retarded and thought by some authorities to not be even conscious, was found to be in fact the superior cerebral member when it came to performing certain kinds of mental tasks.” In other words, the right wasn’t inferior to the left. It was just different. “There appear to be two modes of thinking,” Sperry wrote, “represented rather separately in the left and right hemispheres, respectively.”

The left hemisphere reasons sequentially, excels at analysis, and handles words. The right hemisphere reasons holistically, recognizes patterns, and interprets emotions and nonverbal expressions. Human beings are literally of two minds.
*We need both / ALL / parts of the brain to function at our best.*

Contrary to some 1980's beliefs about right brain - left brain functioning, high levels of creativity require an integration of right and left hemispheric functioning which, with repeated exercise, results in an increase of the micro neural pathways in the corpus callosum. If you think about that for a moment, then you can clearly see the benefits of an art centered approach to therapy.
I’m just sayin…