Jan 11-13, 2006 (Wednesday-Friday)
As children, we all created art until, in school, the identification of “talent” overshadowed universal participation. Our culture restricts creative expression to an anointed few, but people hunger for personal relationships with the creative spirit. Join us to create spontaneous art again, in many media, whether or not you’ve made art before. Renew your childlike wonder. Let art free and heal your soul.
Whether in painting, poetry, performance, music, dance, or life, there’s an intelligence working in every situation, a force that is the primary carrier of creation. If we trust it, collaborate with it, and follow its natural movement, it will find the place we need to be, a destination we could never have known in advance. Creativity requires relaxing into periods of uncertainty and trusting that the creative intelligence will find its way. Imagination involves a magic that cannot be controlled by ego.
When everything seems hopeless, trust the process; something astounding will emerge. This will be an experiential workshop exploring the integration of varied forms of artistic expression. Painting will be the primary medium. In keeping with Jung’s method of active imagination, we’ll respond to art with art and expand our experience of images by imagining them further. We’ll use movement, sound, ritual, and performance to broaden our perception of images as we paint and construct in three dimensions. One expressive medium feeds another, generating a healing, creative energy. Music and drumming help us out of our heads and into our bodies, which physically express our inner vision. There is a shared sense of “I didn’t know I could do this. I never realized what I have inside me.” Participants will receive an art materials list before the workshop. Limited to 20, and it fills up every year, so sign up now.
Shaun McNiff, an artist and internationally renowned figure in the creative arts therapies, is the University Professor at Lesley University, where he created a new certificate program in Advanced Studies in Creativity, Imagination, and Leadership. His many books include the newly released Art Heals: How Creativity Cures the Soul; Creating with Others: The Practice of Imagination in Life, Art and the Workplace; Trust the Process: An Artist’s Guide to Letting Go; and Art as Medicine: Creating a Therapy of the Imagination. His life work is freeing the artist in every person. His visits to Rowe have been “absolutely terrific,” so we keep inviting him back.
“A person’s license to create is irrevocable, and it opens to every corner of daily life. The ways of creation are as natural as breathing and walking. We live within the process of creation just as much as it exists within us.”
— Shaun McNiff