In childhood, we are artists. We draw, dance, make things out of plasticine, without thinking about whether someone likes it or not. With age, however, we lose this joy of creation. How can we learn it anew?
The American psychiatrist and psychotherapist Alexander Lowen was convinced that everyone who creates resembles a child. Creativity results from the need for self-expression and the desire for pleasure. We all have it within us. Małgorzata Karkosz, an art therapist who runs Vedic Art workshops, agrees with this completely: “I believe that we are born with full potential. We are like a lush tree, which over time becomes trimmed according to bonsai standards. It is a paradox: on the one hand, we are under pressure to be creative, and on the other, education and socialization block our creativity.” Art therapy is there to help us.
Follow Your Intuition
“Art therapy is showing ourselves and the world what is within us,” says Karkosz. “Art in the context of art therapy is the voice of the unconscious. Just like dreams, which we also cannot control and which would be pointless to judge.” Participants in her Vedic Art workshops do not learn the principles of combining colors, they do not create—as in classic drawing lessons—a study of the object. Intuition reigns, which the British philosopher Louis Arnaud Reid once described as “knowing without (or against) discursive thinking.” In the article “Intuition and Art,” he emphasized that intuition is a combination of consciousness and the unconscious, spheres that remain separated on a daily basis. Intuitive painting can be compared to automatic writing, which 20th-century spiritualists considered a way of contact with spirits: the deceased communicated through signs drawn on paper by means of an unconscious medium. The difference between intuitive painting and automatic writing is that it is not the spirits who direct our hand—we do it ourselves.
Picasso once said that all his life he learned to paint like a child. According to Karkosz, at Vedic Art workshops you can acquire (or rather regain) this skill. Children paint intuitively, only later do they learn to trust the imposed rules more than themselves: “When I entered my daughter’s kindergarten, I saw that all the mushrooms painted by the children were brown,” recalls the art therapist. “In the paintings, the sky was always blue and on the top, and the grass was green and on the bottom. Children don’t paint that way on their own. If we give them freedom, their skies will be yellow and their grasses will be red. They do not care about the faithful reproduction of reality. They can make a ball out of plasticine and say that it’s Frédéric Chopin, and I can really see that it is Chopin.”
Appealing to children’s imagination and the joy of creation is probably present in all strands of art therapy. Artistic activity has a therapeutic dimension only when it is devoid of fear of judgment or failure, as in the case of the youngest. Arno Stern, a contemporary educator who has been running a children’s painting studio in Paris for sixty years, explains: “A child does not create a work. A child playing creates a world—his own, intimate one.”
Without Mistakes or Evaluations
The foundation of the Vedic Art method is the Beuysian belief that we have creative power from birth. Thanks to artistic activities, we can release these resources: both on canvas and on paper, as well as in life. On the other hand, if we were to look for comparisons in the history of painting, we might consider abstract expressionism, which was derived from surrealism and, like intuitive painting, followed the unconscious. The first of the schools of this trend is action painting, whose representative Jackson Pollock believed, like the Swedish artist Curt Källman, that the most important thing is not the work, but the creative act itself; that in the process of painting one should follow the stimuli. On the other hand, in color field painting, practiced by, among others, Mark Rothko and Barnett Newman, colors and the relationships between them become the carriers of emotions. This thesis is also close to the assumptions of Vedic Art.
The first Vedic Art school was established in 1988 on the island of Öland off the south-east coast of Sweden. Its creator was the aforementioned Curt Källman. In his youth, he studied painting at the Stockholm Academy of Arts, and from 1967 he was also a student of guru Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, the founder of transcendental meditation. It was thanks to him that Källman learned The Vedas, the holy books of Hinduism, which later became an inspiration for a new art therapy method. In Sanskrit, veda means knowledge—the purpose of Vedic Art workshops is to gain knowledge about oneself. When we create, access to the unconscious becomes easier. You paint the way you live; art is a lesson about your emotions, needs, and desires. You need to contact your own creative forces, work with the unconscious, concentrate not on hand movements, but on feelings.
The workshops last four days and usually take place outside of the participants’ place of residence, thanks to which they can break away from everyday life and really focus on their inner self. All meetings begin and end in a circle: at the beginning of the class, everyone can talk about the intention with which they start creative activities, and at the end they can express how they feel after the painting session. The therapeutic self-knowledge is supported by the “principles” developed by Källman, referring to the Hindu Vedas. “These are sentences that are the starting point for the participants,” says Małgorzata Karkosz. “I give such a principle and a task to be performed. Then everyone gets time to interpret this principle and implement it. Then I give another principle, and so on. Each participant slowly delves into their inner self and modifies the image. The works change, they live. I’ve seen some that started with a tree and ended with a big black circle.”
Karkosz emphasizes that while painting intuitively, one cannot make a mistake. Hearing this, I remember my own experiences, not in Vedic Art workshops, but while practicing intuitive drawing. During classes, participants exchanged cards, thanks to which everyone was a co-creator of the final works. The facilitator asked if we were afraid to make a mistake while drawing. Everyone said yes. So she told us to draw these mistakes. Some of them—crosses, lines, strikethroughs, etc.—became key elements of the drawings; others disappeared under subsequent details, but none of them “spoiled” anything.
Apart from the teacher saying the principles during the painting session, there is silence. “It allows you to focus on yourself,” says Karkosz. “No one imposes interpretations on the participants or suggests tools to them. You can experiment: someone starts painting with their hands, someone else uses tree bark for painting, someone mixes paints, tears the canvas, paints on the other side of the canvas.” Everyone decides for themselves when their image is finished. There may be no finished work, or several works may be created. Karkosz says that most people, coming to their first Vedic Art workshops, experience the creative block learned at school. After all, even in art classes, it is more important to achieve a specific effect for which we will receive a grade than to have fun or experiment.
“They start with excuses: ‘I can’t, the last time I painted was in elementary school.’ It is important that they allow themselves to go with the flow, not judge themselves and others. We also do not interpret finished works, although of course we all tend to look for symbols, for the content of the unconscious. We don’t ask, ‘Why did you paint that?’ or ‘What did you mean by that?’ Art therapy is about expression without imposing control on yourself. If it’s a class with movement, I advise you to start with one step, if it’s with images—with a dot. A dot can be turned into a line, and something more can be created out of a line.”
Every decision made during this process is meaningful and can bring new knowledge about ourselves: whether we prefer a large or small format; whether we like changes in the image; whether we are waiting for approval. Such exercises help us understand what we think about ourselves. Freeing ourselves from the limitations learned within the education system or moving away from perceiving the world in binary categories are the first milestones in every art therapy process.
The Art of Living
What other impacts can art therapy have? It relaxes us, improves our concentration, teaches us mindfulness. Some workshop participants also say that artistic activities motivated them to make larger life changes: to improve relationships with loved ones or to change jobs. Others have permanently incorporated art therapy into their lives, while abandoning the illusion that to create, you have to be a great artist.
During art therapy activities, difficult memories or problems that we have tried not to think about may resurface. Although this process is reminiscent of psychotherapy, Małgorzata Karkosz points out that art therapy at Vedic Art workshops does not delve as deeply: “My role is not to learn about other people’s history, name problems, or reveal and treat traumas. We don’t have the tools to do that, and we can’t cross anyone’s boundaries. Nor should we ever impose interpretations. It is necessary to ask open questions wisely, to enquire, but not to suggest answers. And above all, to follow the participants attentively. These are the tasks of the teacher. At the same time, art therapy can become self-therapy if someone is so attentive and aware that they can then transform knowledge about themselves into specific life changes.”
Read similar:
