Short Articles
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Painting for the Second Half of Life
A picture of yourself as a living piece of artwork, as a path to self-knowledge and transformation. In 2016 and 2017 I ran a series of consecutive weekend workshops exploring biography using therapeutic painting with a medical basis. These workshops were specifically aimed at people in the second half of life i.e. over 45 years… Read more
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Being creative
A lived experience I want to write about the lived experience of being creative, so I sit down at my desk with pen and paper to gather my thoughts. But I am immediately beset with what I know, crowding out what I feel or what I experience. Deep immersion into so many theories¹ of creativity and into others’… Read more
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Some Thoughts on Drawing as a Contemplative Practice
Art has long been recognized as a tool for self-knowledge, but it is increasingly recognized as a contemplative practice. It can be used simply to observe the way your mind processes information; as a meditation for quieting and focusing the mind and emotions; but it also has potential for increasing one’s awareness of the… Read more
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Some thoughts on the practice of beholding art
Light and darkness as revealed The polarity of light and darkness is an excellent example of a binary opposition where the two opposing forces are best experienced simultaneously. Although they can be found in nature separately, our experiencing of them is enhanced by seeing them together, in interplay. consider the two photographic images to… Read more
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Imagining Alternatives
Educationalist Guy Claxton has suggested that the walls of halls in schools should be covered the the progressive stages of creative works, so that children could see the “soft” stages of a creativity, the incompleteness and open-endedness that characterise the unfolding of a creative process, rather than only seeing the end products, the works of art themselves. In this… Read more
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In Their Own Words: Letters from Artists
This is a post published back in July at Read Watch Play for their #artread month. Since I have a new-ish blog that needs posts, I thought I would publish it on my own site. I guess I’m an art snob. I love beauty more than chocolate, wax lyrical about votive cups from long gone… Read more
Painted Space 