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What is Spontaneous Painting?

NO PRIOR ARTISTIC BACKGROUND IS NECESSARY IN ORDER TO BENEFIT FROM THIS EXPERIENCE

Spontaneous Painting is a self-discovery process and unique approach in art therapy that aligns the participant with their Essence, their true identity, and develops the creative personality. Participants spontaneously create powerful paintings from their Essence and express onto a blank canvas their unconscious symbolic images. Through this process people gain greater insight into their vocation, life purpose and rich inner world. When consciousness is not dominated by rational thinking, we can develop our multiple intelligences and potentials through creative expression, such as our emotional intelligence, personal essential aptitudes, intuition, precognition, potentials, creative personality, and transcendent states, to name a few.

The Symbol

The Spontaneous Painting Process increases the intellectual, creative and spiritual development of the Whole Being. When we face a blank canvas and spontaneously express with no preconceived ideas, and are open to receive whatever colors or forms spontaneously arise, we open a channel for our unconscious contents to communicate in a symbolic language through Art. The symbol is a psychic energy which exists in a dormant state in the unconscious, and the act of painting motivated by deep emotion catalyzes (awakens) the contents of the symbol. Through the painting of symbolic images we can contact an alternate form of wisdom. The act of Spontaneous Painting is a curative process which catalyzes the symbols of one's Essence (true identity) and lights the way for qualitative changes in our relationship to ourselves and the way we act in the world.

THAT WHICH WE WERE BORN TO BECOME EXISTS AS A SEED INSIDE OF US AND THE CHALLENGE IS TO LIBERATE THIS POTENTIAL

Participants are stimulated to question their "limiting beliefs", have breakthroughs that may stimulate the development of new thought patterns and new painting styles. The objective is to paint with no concern for beauty or judgments, expressing powerful emotional content through brushstrokes. These paintings often reflect an inner beauty and authenticity which stimulates the viewer, because they are expressing universal archetypes which exist in all of us.

Objectives of the process:

  1. To understand the dynamics of the creative process and the blocks that inhibit the process of the creator.
    To discuss the conditions which are favorable for developing a creative environment in which risk-taking can occur.
    To be familiar with the characteristics of the creative personality.
    To understand the dynamics of the creative personality and personality and develop teaching methodologies to encourage these characteristics in participants.

  2. To stimulate creative intelligence through engaging in various activites such as creative writing, guided fantasies and visualizations, artistic forms of expression in various mediuns, Biodance movement and other forms of corporeal expression, buddhist and taoist meditation, and other vias of stimulating creative thought.

  3. To become familiar with various states of consciousness, natural intelligences and language systems besides those of rational and intellectual perception, for example: kinesthetic, emotional, intrapersonal, interpersonal, musical, linguistic, logical, spatial (space-time), spiritual, symbolic learning and various symbolic language systems which express in artistic creations, dreams, myths and fairytales.

  4. To develop emotional education and explore new teaching methodologies in this field: communicating affective states, imagination, intuition and corporeal intelligence.

  5. To offer basic techniques in painting, design and composition.

  6. To promote opportunities for participants to transmit to the canvas the emotions they experience at an unconscious level, awakening self-awareness.

  7. To encourage the participants in their search for understanding another potential of art. Study the intimate relationship between creativity and archetypal image, and how Spontaneous Painting is a way of expressing an imanent and transcendent reality, through the exploration of essential unconscious contents that aid in strengthening one's identity.

  8. To introduce the learning of communication skills for working with groups, facilitating comprehension of the systematic processes ocurring in groups and how to create harmony and facilitate methods of meaningful interaction and open discussion.

  9. To encourage participants to develop and internal source of inspiration and develop the self-confidence to believe in their intuitive, creative voice (or muse), and contribute new ideas, inventions, professions, and methods to enrich society.

A culture which does not encourage the creative potential of its members does not evolve and will stagnate and vanish

It is my hope expand the definition of creativity so that ever more people, not only artists, but all of us believe in our  capability as co-creators of our own lives, and shape them to correspond to our heart's desires and unique talents.

Working individually and in small groups we utilize various creative channels of expression: painting, clay and stream of consciousness writing. Additionally through verbal sharing in group process we try to help each other decipher the symbolic language of each other's paintings.

Different types of preparatory exercises are presented before each painting session, enabling participants to relax the constant shatter of the rational mind and contact hidden dimensions of one's inner landscape. Some of these exercises include: Vipassana meditation, Biocreative movement from South America and other forms of spontaneous expressions from our corporeal unconscious.

A new educational paradigm

This course is a transformative approach in emotional education. Education in addition to teaching "intellectual information" must reeducate learners to develop their unique potentials and creative personality characteristics. Once a significant number of people have actualized their potentials and creative personality, I believe there will be an evolutionary breakthrough in human consciousness.

We are interested in training facilitators in this method to work with various populations (children, adolescents, adults and the elderly) so that they may encourage the development of the creative personality. These facilitators will be multipliers of a new cultural-educational perspective. In order to develop the creative personality in others, the facilitator needs to develop these qualities within and personally experience the transformative process of rebirthing one's true identity.

 

 

Characteristics of the creative personality include:

  1. the ability to take risks
  2. nonconformity, independent thinker
  3. receptive to different ideas
  4. self-motivated
  5. persistent
  6. curious
  7. adventurous
  8. innovative, ingenuity
  9. impulsive, spontaneous
  10. ability to access deeper regions of the unconscious
  11. ability to feel things intensely
  12. extremely sensitive
  13. ability to perceive interconnections between apparently separate subjects
  14. global thinking
  15. seeks internal rather than external approval 
  16. ability to think symbolically (abstractly)
  17. openness to new experiences
  18. variety of interests
  19. appreciates solitude

The Spontaneous Painting Process is unique in its approach to art therapy in that it focuses not on pathology, but on developing the special light that each person has. Once each person understands and actualizes their creative potentials, they can bring forth new dreams and ideas to enrich the new millenium, communicate their self-worth and existential beauty and enrich society with their presence.