Sketching on my phone

My first attempt at sketching on my phone isn't so great.

Here's the thing... phone screens are tiny.  It is AMAZING that this is even slightly possible, but it is hard to compose an image.  This one kind of looks like a flower throwing up.

I want to make more art and be more involved in my artsy side.  I spend a good portion of my time cooking, laundry, cleaning, baby entertaining, errand running... I want to spend some time making something.  It feels productive.  Somehow doing things like laundry, cooking, and cleaning - things that, once you do them, you will have to do them again tomorrow - don't feel as productive as making an object or an image.  You don't have to make an image again and again.  You make it the one time and it's there forever.

Today I did a load of laundry, cooked two days' worth of vegetables, took the kids to two different play groups, changed countless diapers, and so on.  I'm going to have to do that stuff tomorrow.  But this dumb little sketch I made on my phone is done... haha!

New Perspectives Directive (or: funky colors and waterspouts)

 In a previous post I showed you some fun pictures I took with my iphone camera of a random plant.  Well, the plant is actually the plant in the art room at work.  How that came about was I was waiting for a client who didn't come, so in the meantime I took pictures (something I often do when I don't know what to do with myself).  I chose to take some close-ups of the plant in the art room.  Then I realized if I took pictures with my iphone then I could email them to myself and edit them at work instead of waiting to get home!  I did just that, then turned them into the black and white images you see in the other post, and brought them to groups.

The first time I brought them to a group I just had them out in case someone needed some inspiration.  Two clients began coloring them in with funky colors.  Meanwhile, I traced one of the images and then colored it in with some interesting colors of my own.

I was really interested in how this came out!  Also what came of making this during the group was that people wanted to learn how to mix colors on the paper like I did - either with colored pencils (what I used) or oil pastels.  The result is that now I will be running a workshop on techniques for using oil pastels next week, since I think it is probably one of the most accessible drawing materials and a lot of "heavy handed" people may enjoy learning how to create illusions of depth, etc etc.

The second time I brought the images to group I pre-cut them into lots of random shapes, purposefully obscuring the image so it didn't look so planty anymore.  I then asked participants to glue one or two of these pieces onto a larger sheet of construction paper and then include those images in a larger art piece.  I said, think of these as the "seeds" for a larger art project.

My project ended up looking like a lot of waterspouts on a turbulent ocean.  I wonder what that's about.  It's probably the most violent image I've made in a long time, even though it's in all blues, greens, and browns.

Anyway, the group really got the idea of the project and ran with it.  It was great to see where people went.  I think pre-cutting the image really helped people move past its origins and try to make something new instead of relying on the original form of the plant.

In general I love using the xerox machine to warp images, so I may continue to stretch the plant pictures beyond their origins and bring them into the groups to have at it!

Eraser Landscape

I took an impression of the pieces of eraser left on the art room table today.

It was a lot. A lot a lot.

Some people demonstrate anxiety by
pressing down on a pencil or crayon really hard,
some people
color with a marker over a spot so many times that the paper rips. 
There are countless ways people demonstrate anxiety
with art materials.

One of those ways is erasing.

Erasing until the eraser is gone,
until it's just a nub. 
Erasing until there's a rip in the paper. 
Once a mark is made it's almost impossible to completely unmake. 
Must keep erasing. 
Even after it's no longer making any changes,
erasing, erasing, erasing. 
The eraser is ripped to pieces
and you blow the pieces around the table,
or maybe make a pile of them as you deftly wipe them off the paper like garbage. 
These little sticky white rubber pieces that aren't useful anymore,
not that they were useful in the first place,
at least after the first few passes.

The art room was empty. 
I couldn't resist. 
I saw a mountain range of pilled-up eraser pieces
and I had to have a picture somehow. 
I didn't have my camera.

So I gently laid my paper
over the mountain range
and rubbed with a pencil.

First, I rubbed lightly,
but it wasn't coming out how I liked
so I tried adding pressure. 
Then I just kept going. 
And the rubbing of the pencil
seemed to mimic the movement
the eraser must have made. 
A dance to honor the death of a once-useful yellow artist's eraser.

I made four xerox copies of the rubbing
so I could keep it
without getting graphite all over myself
(too late).

 

It wasn't enough.

When I got home I took an eraser and
erased the rubbing of the eraser. 
Erased, erased, erased
until I ripped the page. 
Then erased some more. 
It's very hard to erase a xerox,
and the eraser is useless
after the first layer. 
At first I thought I might make a design
but I realized quickly that was impossible
so I focused on simply erasing the pigment from the page.

Tectonic plates collided,
earthquakes formed a new landscape in the wrinkles of the paper.

I erased so much
the fiber of the paper cracked
and felt soft and smooth like cotton.

I stopped because my hand hurt and
I felt like what I was doing was useless.

After all that work,
all I had was a ripped sheet of paper
and a used-up eraser.


.

The Scribble Strikes Again

When I'm not sure what to do in my groups sometimes I will go back to the materials. Last week, we explored chalk pastels. The only thing I don't like about chalk pastels is that you can't just stop working on a piece and be done with it. The chalk will get everywhere - forever and ever - if you don't fix it somehow, either with hairspray or a spray fixative. It's very frustrating. This extra step, which seems so simple, almost never gets done, and so every time I touch it I alter the image. Especially when you have a big group, this can get very messy very quickly!

However, I love how chalk pastels can really seem to come alive. The colors glow and shimmer as they are layered and blended.

Also, lately I've been working almost exclusively on black paper in these art groups. I like using the black paper because the brightly colored pastels (oil or chalk) really pop from the page. It also helps a little with the anxiety of a big blank sheet of paper, since it somehow doesn't seem to have the same expectation and intimidation of a white page.

When we were talking about our pieces, people said mine looks like someone reaching out to give a hug. An open circle. I like these ideas... I should actually explore some of my scribbles through poems and more artwork but lately I haven't really wanted to revisit my thesis!

Same to you, buddy! :(

I was still kind of on this high today after having such a good day in the clay studio yesterday. I'm at work, walking around, la dee da, and a client passes me in the hallway as I'm off to lunch and says "Do you mind?"

"Mind what?" I asked.

"Mind if I ask you a question?"

"What question?" (sometimes the questions are too personal to answer)

"Well, why don't you dress more respectably? If you just brushed your hair and wore a nice shirt you'd look respectable."

I was pretty much floored. I lamely said, "I like my clothes..." and walked away, off to lunch, alone :(

I was pretty hurt and angry. I went to the cafeteria and wrote in my journal first thing, because I had to get this feeling out somewhere and I didn't have anyone to talk to right then. Cascading sadness :( :(

Wow he made me feel really terrible. It really brought me back to comments I've heard throughout my life about not dressing well enough. There was a time when I was a teenager and I wore pajamas all day every day...

But anyway! What! I felt so defensive and sad. It took writing all of that out in my journal to be able to take a step back and really think about the situation. If he hadn't been a client, I could have said something really nasty right back. That made me remember who he is and look beyond his comment. I know him, I know how vulnerable he is. And I wondered, did someone just say this to him recently? Did it hurt when he heard it like it hurt when he said it to me? Because saying "You would look more respectable" doesn't even sound like something he would ever say!

Where I work it is important to talk to clients about hygiene and dress, but I guess this is just a reminder about how it's also important to be sensitive about it. Just because someone isn't taking care of herself doesn't mean she doesn't think about it. I had a lot of reasons for dressing like a shlub in high school, and none of them were that I didn't care how I looked.

My reaction was wanting to say it to someone else, pass on the poison, but instead I'm taking it in, processing it, and putting it out here and in my journal. I guess that's part of being a therapist. If I were in a one-on-one with someone who thought I reminded them of an abusive parent, I'd have to hold a lot of poison like that, so this was basically nothing in comparison. I wish I had been able to do it faster, though, and been able to say something in the hallway. I guess I just wasn't prepared! Talk about a surprise attack!!

I mean, let's not make any pretenses of maturity here. Of course I immediately went to the bathroom to check my outfit/hair in the mirror. Don't worry, I looked cute. (HA!)

Flower

I made this during the open art studio time at work yesterday. I'm not sure what it is. Someone suggested it's a water lily or lotus, someone suggested it's holding fire.

Directive: Ripped Paper

(Artwork by the group facilitator - me! - and shown with permission)

Ripped Paper (Coping with new situations)
Date(s) completed: 8/23/10

Single or Multi Session?
Single

Age of Group Members?
Adults (Could be adapted for all age groups)

Gender of group:
Men and women

Number of members?
10 (any size would work though)

Type of site?
Outpatient

Other relevant information about population or site?
Clients diagnosed with severe mental illness. The topic of the group is "Coping Skills Through Art"

Materials Used?
2d

Describe materials needed for directive
Large pieces of pre-ripped paper
Miscellaneous art supplies (markers, crayons, paint, tape, staples, glue, etc)

Directive Description:
Choose a piece of ripped paper and incorporate it into an art piece: be inspired by the shape, fold it up into something else, make a sculpture, whatever you'd like. But! Do not cut the ripped paper.

Objective:
The topic of this group is "coping skills through art." This directive asks clients to cope with new situations. Often, clients will make art using the same technique given content-related directives. This is a technique-related directive, where the content is up to the clients. This project can be frustrating so it is important to leave time for discussion of the experience at the end of the group and debrief any frustrations.

Prior directives or prep work with group?
Haven't posted them yet

Comments/questions/suggestions for improvement:
I think this could be a part of a large series of coping art projects.


This was also posted on the Directives Blog (which is a private blog for our class to share art therapy directives we come up with)

Job fair

I went to my first job fair ever on Monday. It was quite an experience and honestly I was a little overwhelmed. BUT. I think it went well. Afterward, I was still sort of shaken (it's hard putting yourself out there face to face for 2 hours!) but feeling good, so I did a journal entry, of course.


It started off as a repetition of circles, then blossomed out more and more into what feels to me like a sunflower.

So I looked up sunflowers to find out more about them. One thing that's really interesting I learned was that sunflowers are "heliotropic," which means they follow the sun throughout the day. Some plants grow in the direction of the sun, but a sunflower actually moves during the day depending on where the sun is in the sky. What an interesting characteristic!

The job fair I went to was for art teachers, not for art therapists specifically. But the jobs I applied to were for teaching art to kids who may not have many opportunities for them, especially in art making. So I wonder if this is me turning my little head towards the sun, because I am feeling kind of in the dark about art therapy and where I fit into the field. I can bring my art therapy training to after school art programs in my intention to my projects: to empower kids to recognize their strengths and the resources they have, to work on team building and cooperation skills, to build self-esteem through learning new skills and creating projects, and so on. Maybe this is a good direction for me? And if not, I believe I can be flexible enough to shift positions again if I need to.

Thud

This is the sound of an art therapy directive dying.




That was how I felt after one of my groups I ran a little bit ago. The directive just fell completely flat. I changed my idea multiple times during the group to see if I could go with what the group would be open to doing, but I just couldn't make it work.

After the group I was kind of sad and I drew this picture in my journal. But I realized that there were some small things that happened in the group that were great. Even though they may have seemed small to me at the time, I have to contextualize the work I'm doing, who I'm doing it with, and where they are right now. In other words, I had to "meet them where they were at." (A phrase that doesn't make sense to me - ending a sentence with "at"? Why does everyone say it that way?)

My Character Today

This isn't really an original idea but I did it today in one of my art therapy groups. The directive was to choose a character that you identify with today and then make a piece about it.

I said that my character is Dorothy from Wizard of Oz because I'm on a long, maybe scary journey and I have friends to support me on the way :)

So here is my piece:


I have never been good at drawing four-legged animals, so... that is a pretty sad lion.

My favorite part of the drawing is Dorothy. I had printed out some pictures of characters from movies, comic books, cartoons, etc, as inspiration or to incorporate into a picture.



Nice legs! (haha)

Wednesday scribble

We did scribble drawings in one of the art therapy groups on Wednesday, kind of just trying something new and seeing what happens from it. I think my supervisor suggested it because she knows it's my thing (haha). Some people really got it and seemed to like it a lot. A scribble can be anything, so even the people who didn't quite understand the concept came up with some interesting drawings.

This was the scribble that I made...


I didn't process it afterwards, but I feel like it's an opening up picture, like the top of some kind of vessel is sliding to the side and you can see the juice inside.

Print of a scribble

Today I made a print! A real old-fashioned linoleum cut print like I used to do in undergrad and the years before grad school.


This print is inspired by this scribble:



I was going to do a reduction print to get more colors, but who am I kidding. I was never a very precise printer and I'm out of practice with hand printing so there's a good chance I'll mess up a majority of the prints and only get one good one.

I wish more of the "messy" surrounding space had shown up. I'll have to make sure to ink it more thoroughly next time. I call it messy because usually one would want to get rid of all of that junk and make it look nice and clean. But I actually like the way it looks, almost like it was cut from wood and not linoleum.

I also have a screen print version of one of my larger scribbles in the works but I'm not as big a fan of screen printing as I am of linoleum cut printing. The process of creating the screen is not as fun or interesting as creating a block for me. But that one I am planning on doing with many colors (I think I have 4 colors), so maybe I will tackle that tomorrow and Thursday.

My installation

The gallery is open now so I thought I would post a picture of my installation! This is the final piece to my thesis project, all of my work (including the poetry) all in one place. PHEW!

Sneak Peek!

I installed my piece in the show today... it took 5 hours, yes, five whole hours, but it's done. Installed and done. It looks so good. It's all of my thesis artwork and poetry in one place, grouped together and everything. If you've read my thesis, you'll understand it more than just seeing it on the wall, but I think even just seeing it on the wall will be interesting. The poetry will invite people to become intimately involved in my pieces, not just letting them view them from a distance.

Can't wait to see what everyone's stuff looks like on Friday!!!!

Scribble 8 : Connections II

I tried to adapt my group to the new circumstances but it didn't quite work out. This was 35 minutes of work, that's all the time we had. I continued with the theme of "Connections" since I didn't have any group members last week.

With this one I actually had an idea in mind for what I might do. I thought of how drops of water are individuals but when they get near each other they fuse to form a group: a puddle, a pond, a lake, an ocean. I thought that was an interesting way to think of connections: a relationship, a community, a nation... Unfortunately I didn't have enough time for these drops to actually fuse together, so now I just have a bunch of independent drops floating in space.

Scribble 7 : Connections ?

The week I made this I was supposed to focus on "Connections." It was the last full 2 hours I spent in the art studio because my group isn't working out as well as I'd hoped for reasons beyond my control.

I know I'll be doing a lot of moving and traveling over the summer but it might be interesting to turn these into paintings or series of paintings and prints. I have a lot of them now.

Thesis Scribble 3

I investigated the hole on the right (surrounded by orange) in this art piece and this plant art piece.

Thesis Scribble 2

This scribble goes with this art piece and this art piece.

Thesis Scribble 1

FINALLY my scribbles are scanned in and ready to be viewed by the general public (both on my blog and in my thesis).

This scribble inspired first this art response and then this response. You can see I focus a lot on that giant red bubble.

Scribble 6 : Tree

When I was reading Bruce Moon's book The Dynamics of Art as Therapy with Adolescents, I noticed that all of his groups had some kind of theme. Even though the youth were free to make whatever they wanted they always had a theme. I figured this was in case someone felt stuck and didn't know what to make.

I thought I might increase my attendance to the open art drop-in group if I introduce an optional theme. Today's optional theme was "TREES." I wanted to be able to have conversations about the metaphor of a tree, something that is grounded and consistent but flexible and growing. So inevitably my scribble turned into a tree.

Someone said it was Picasso-like but I think they were going for Van Gogh.

Someone else said I should be selling these scribbles. So far I've made 6. The problem is I'm very attached to these things, I see my inner psyche playing out in them, I don't want someone else to have them!