Shamanic Painting & Remedial Art

Creative expression has long been linked to our spiritual lives - from cave drawings to Tibetan sand mandalas, from chapel ceilings to the engraved stones of Ireland. Bringing art into our personal practice allows us to tap into many supportive qualities:

• It opens the channel to receive insights and inspiration from the unseen realm, from spirit, and Imbas - a Gaelic term for the inspired energy of spiritual prose and creativity. It also allows us to access hidden aspects of our own psyche and subconscious. Opening this channel, in turn, supports our shamanic journey practice if one is looking to foster and cultivate that skill.
• It gives us an avenue to visually record encounters with our spiritual guides, spiritual experiences, visions, and significant events - along with how these make us feel.

• Art created when holding specific intentions or incorporating certain medicines brings this "unseen" work into our tangible, day-to-day living world. It helps anchor and make manifest healing work done within ourselves and the spirit realm.
• When we receive a symbol, message, dream or healing and spend the time sitting with it during our creation process, we continue to focus our awareness on those meanings, deepening the experience in our awareness as well as our physical bodies - our nervous system spends all that time re-balancing and we actually create and strengthen the associated neural pathways within our brain! When the painting is complete, we have a visual cue that immediately brings forward a fully experienced knowing that continues to support our integration process of the symbol, message, dream, or healing.

Art as Medicine Sessions

I am happy to work with you on a one-to-one basis to personalize and bring out medicinal qualities of painting with a focus on both remedial and/or technical support. This is best done as a weekly series of 2 to 3 hour sessions each with either Stockmar watercolours for the wet-on-wet technique or canvas and acrylic paint. The session cost is $50 per hour plus associated supply fees.
Depending on your intentions with this work, we may dive into any combination of the following;
Remedial:

• We softly work with personality types and emotional components to help bring expression and balance. Encouraging softness with intense, assertive personalities and bringing boldness to the quiet - while also encouraging and honouring your natural expression of who you are!
• Self esteem building
• Enjoying the creative process more
• Being okay with mistakes
• Shifting gears when your painting is becoming something different than what you had in mind
• Feeling freer to explore creativity without an agenda to "make good art"
• Feeling more confident to tackle subjects you find most difficult

All of these aspects experienced while painting naturally begin to unfold into the rest of our mundane daily living. It truly is a beautiful healing modality.
We would also explore techniques as desired such as: 

• Colour mixing & washes - how to get the colours and intensity you want
• Procedural steps - what to paint first, next, last
• Control vs Letting Go - timing to achieve crisp details, soft blending, or allowing organic spreading 
• Composition & Perspective
• Tricks on how to recover or incorporate mistakes
• Achieving a more 3D look with shading & perspective
• Opportunities to tackle common challenges like the human eye, faces, hands with guidance

Much deep inner work may surface during your remedial sessions - some of it will be easy and feel fantastic, while some of it may be quite challenging. All of it brings opportunities for personal healing!

My favorite medicinal way to paint with people is by creating mandalas that hold a specific healing vibration