Conversations without words
My voluntary work in the hospice service gives me great pleasure and is absolutely enriching. For example, I particularly enjoyed preparing and conducting a training series on art therapy techniques for and with our group of volunteer end-of-life and bereavement counselors. As soon as brushes and paint come into play, completely new levels of conversation can open up. It was very exciting for all of us.
Mysterious
How can I put something inexpressible and mysterious on paper without having to reveal too much? How can I open up a little bit and safely, reveal a little bit of what is bothering me without revealing too much?
We tried out the “white on white!” technique. We painted, blotted, wiped, smudged and perhaps smudged again with the same white paint on prepared surfaces. In the end, only as much is recognizable as I want to allow myself and the viewer to see. A first step towards perhaps expressing the inexpressible.
Feelings are more colorful than you thought
One of the things that becomes clear in the circle of feelings is how accurately each of us assigns a feeling to a color. Opposite each other in the circle were “pairs of feelings”, i.e. a mood with the individually found opposite to it. Very accurate and very individually different. Our own emotional world can be experienced in a much more colorful way than the monotonous gray in which we may feel trapped.
Embarrassing, embarrassing!
Fabrics, needles and thread are also exciting materials. What material is joy, love, fear, helplessness or longing made of? Each of us tried to approach a “chosen” emotional state for this evening, for which I had prepared cards with the corresponding terms. I myself dedicated my experiment to the rather unpleasant emotional state of “embarrassment”. The result was a garish hat that I wouldn’t have wanted to wear on the street! A dear colleague then shocked me by going home with the impossible piece on her head. Hats off! I only liked to show it off briefly behind closed doors in an intimate circle.
