Magazine Photo CollageIn art lingo, collage simply means "to glue," and is the assembling of different images or materials to create a new whole. It emerged as an art form in the early 20th century in the work of Picasso, Braque, and other artists, continuing through the present. One of the most famous photo collages and Pop Art classic, Just What Is It that Makes Today's Homes So Different, So Appealing, is a quintessential example from the art world of how found images from a variety of sources are used to generate something completely different than their original intent.
Magazine photo collage is widely used to express emotion largely because it's a forgiving medium, especially for individuals who are intimidated by pencils, paint, or clay. In making a collage, you don't have to go through the agony of drawing something realistic and are spared the feeling of embarrassment that your pictures look like a ten-year-old drew them; this is a welcome relief to most students who bring this worry to the classroom. It also doesn't demand an immediate commitment like a brushstroke across a canvas. In fact, until you glue the images to a surface, you can change your mind, experiment with composition, and add and subtract pictures until you get it right. |
Mask MakingMasks are worn for performance, entertainment, disguise, concealment, or protection. They have been around since ancient times and have been used in ceremony, storytelling, and dramatic enactment. Making a mask invites you to explore the persona you reveal or conceal from the world.
Masks are all about communication through the wearable image of a face. In art and drama, they are used for their expressive potential in enactment and ritual. Masks are a universal art form that generally evokes power, magic, and mystery for both those who wear them and their audience. |
Creating Together"Creating together" is not so much a specific art therapy intervention, but is simply the therapeutic use of art making within group formats. There is a distinctive kind of creative energy generated when people work together to create art. Call it synergy or collective flow. But whatever ever you call it, it's an experience that has the potential to change our perceptions of who we are and shows us how to get by with a little creative help from our friends. While art making is often defined as a solitary pursuit, creating with others or in the presence of others taps the curative factors beyond those that can be found within oneself.
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Mandala DrawingWe humans have always had a fascination with the circle. We experience it throughout nature-- in the spiral of the Milky Way, the orbiting planets, and the cycles of life itself. As children, we also discover that we can use a crayon to make circular forms on paper; it's a universal stage of artistic development that every normal child throughout the world experiences. In fact, it is the first major milestone in image-making and for that reason, a child's circle drawing may be one the earliest representations of the self.
Circular forms in art are often referred to as mandalas, the Sanskrit word for "sacred circle." For thousands of years the creation of circular, often geometric designs has been part of spiritual practices around the world and almost every culture has revered the power of the circle. Eastern cultures have used specific mandalas for visual meditation for many centuries; the Tibetan Buddhist Kalachakra, also known as the Wheel of Time, is probably one of the most famous mandalas and symbolically illustrates the entire structure of the universe. Circular forms are found at the prehistoric Stonehenge monument in England and the 13th century labyrinth at the base of Chartres Cathedral in France. Spiritual seekers have consistently created mandalas to bring forth the sacred through images and have evoked the circle in ritual and art making for the purpose of transcendence, mindfulness, and wellness. Carl Gustav Jung is credited with introducing the Eastern concept of the mandala to Western thought and believed this symbol represented the total personality -- aka the Self. Jung noted that when a mandala image suddenly turned up in dreams or art, it was usually an indication of movement toward a new self-knowledge. He observed that his patients often spontaneously created circle drawings and had his own profound personal experience with mandala images.He believed that mandalas denoted a unification of opposites, served as expressions of the self, and represented the sum of who we are. |
Painting is just another way of keeping a diary.
~Pablo Picasso |
Visual JournalingVisual journals are essentially "art diaries." They often contain both images [usually drawings] and words. Like an actual diary, their contents may be rough drafts that may later become finished artworks. And like an actual diary, they are meant to document day-to-day experiences, activities, and emotions and are often autobiographical in nature. Although they are defined as an art form, visual journals have been used for centuries as records of ideas and imagination. Da Vinci's drawing journals of flying machines and physicist Stephen Hawking's diagrams of the space-time continuum are just a couple of well-known examples.
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