Artful Therapy


Book Description

Use the therapeutic potential of art to make progress in your practice Artful Therapy shows you how to use art to make a difference in therapy. Using visual imagery and art creation, you can help people with medical problems understand how they feel about their illness; victims of abuse "tell without talking"; and substance abuse and eating disorder clients tap into unresolved issues. These are just a few examples of how the power of art can improve your practice. Ideal for mental health professionals and allied workers with little or no art background, this accessible and proven guide takes you through the techniques of using art and visual imagery, and shows you how they can benefit clients of varying ages and abilities. With the art therapy tools provided, you can open potentially groundbreaking new dialogues with your clients. Author Judith Aron Rubin draws on more than forty years experience as an art therapist to help you maximize the value of art as a therapeutic tool, in both the mental health disciplines, such as psychology and social work, and related specialties. An accompanying DVD contains models for practitioners, showing art therapy being used in actual clinical practice. The DVD clearly models: * Initiating the art-making process * Using art in assessment * Using mental imagery, with or without art * Implementing other art forms--such as drama and music--in therapy * Using art with a variety of client types, including children, families, and groups * Assigning art as "homework" Whether or not you have used art therapy with your clients or are thinking about integrating art therapy in your practice, making the most of art in the clinical setting begins with Artful Therapy.




Art as Social Practice


Book Description

With a focus on socially engaged art practices in the twenty-first century, this book explores how artists use their creative practices to raise consciousness, form communities, create change, and bring forth social impact through new technologies and digital practices. Suzanne Lacy’s Foreword and section introduction authors Anne Balsamo, Harrell Fletcher, Natalie Loveless, Karen Moss, and Stephanie Rothenberg present twenty-five in-depth case studies by established and emerging contemporary artists including Kim Abeles, Christopher Blay, Joseph DeLappe, Mary Beth Heffernan, Chris Johnson, Rebekah Modrak, Praba Pilar, Tabita Rezaire, Sylvain Souklaye, and collaborators Victoria Vesna and Siddharth Ramakrishnan. Artists offer firsthand insight into how they activate methods used in socially engaged art projects from the twentieth century and incorporated new technologies to create twenty-first century, socially engaged, digital art practices. Works highlighted in this book span collaborative image-making, immersive experiences, telematic art, time machines, artificial intelligence, and physical computing. These reflective case studies reveal how the artists collaborate with participants and communities, and have found ways to expand, transform, reimagine, and create new platforms for meaningful exchange in both physical and virtual spaces. An invaluable resource for students and scholars of art, technology, and new media, as well as artists interested in exploring these intersections.




Slow Looking


Book Description

Slow Looking provides a robust argument for the importance of slow looking in learning environments both general and specialized, formal and informal, and its connection to major concepts in teaching, learning, and knowledge. A museum-originated practice increasingly seen as holding wide educational benefits, slow looking contends that patient, immersive attention to content can produce active cognitive opportunities for meaning-making and critical thinking that may not be possible though high-speed means of information delivery. Addressing the multi-disciplinary applications of this purposeful behavioral practice, this book draws examples from the visual arts, literature, science, and everyday life, using original, real-world scenarios to illustrate the complexities and rewards of slow looking.




Art as Contemplative Practice


Book Description

Drawing upon his personal experience as a practitioner-researcher, visual artist, and cancer survivor, Michael A. Franklin offers a rich and thought-provoking guide to art as contemplative practice. His firsthand experience and original artwork complement this extensive discussion by consulting various practice traditions including yoga, rasa and darshan experiences, imaginal intelligence, and the contemplative instincts of select early twentieth-century artists. From this synthesis, Franklin suggests that we treat art as a form of yoga and meditation with the potential to awaken deeper insight into the fundamental nature of the Self. Exercises and rubrics are included that offer accessible instruction for any artist, meditation or yoga practitioner, art educator, or art therapist.




The Artful Edit: On the Practice of Editing Yourself


Book Description

An intimate, lively guide to the magic and mechanics of editing by a veteran editor and writer, this book explores the many-faceted and often misunderstood--or simply overlooked--art of editing.




The Creative Conversation


Book Description

Approaching creativity as a form of spiritual practice, artist Benton breaks the creative process down into its most basic components and offers a fresh perspective on developing one's creative skills.




Fully Present


Book Description

“Excellent. Fully Present offers one of the clearest introductions to mindfulness in the field.” —Library Journal Mindfulness has attracted ever‑growing interest and tens of thousands of practitioners, who have come to the discipline from both within and outside the Buddhist tradition. In Fully Present, leading mindfulness researchers and educators Dr. Sue Smalley and Diana Winston provide an all‑in‑one guide for anyone interested in bringing mindfulness to daily life as a means of enhancing well‑being. This new edition, how with a new afterword, provides both a scientific explanation for how mindfulness positively and powerfully affects the brain and the body as well as practical guidance to develop both a practice and mindfulness in daily living, not only through meditation but also during daily experiences. Now, you can wait in line at the supermarket, exercise, or face difficult news with calm and mental fortitude. Ditch the absent-minded lifestyle and begin bringing your full self and your full mind everywhere. With research studies, personal accounts, and practical applications, Fully Present highlights how things like simply breathing, listening, and walking can change your perspective--and your life.




Landscape Painting


Book Description

Because nature is so expansive and complex, so varied in its range of light, landscape painters often have to look further and more deeply to find form and structure, value patterns, and an organized arrangement of shapes. In Landscape Painting, Mitchell Albala shares his concepts and practices for translating nature's grandeur, complexity, and color dynamics into convincing representations of space and light. Concise, practical, and inspirational, Landscape Painting focuses on the greatest challenges for the landscape artist, such as: • Simplification and Massing: Learn to reduce nature's complexity by looking beneath the surface of a subject to discover the form's basic masses and shapes.• Color and Light: Explore color theory as it specifically applies to the landscape, and learn the various strategies painters use to capture the illusion of natural light.• Selection and Composition: Learn to select wisely from nature's vast panorama. Albala shows you the essential cues to look for and how to find the most promising subject from a world of possibilities. The lessons in Landscape Painting—based on observation rather than imitation and applicable to both plein air and studio practice—are accompanied by painting examples, demonstrations, photographs, and diagrams. Illustrations draw from the work of more than 40 contemporary artists and such masters of landscape painting as John Constable, Sanford Gifford, and Claude Monet. Based on Albala's 25 years of experience and the proven methods taught at his successful plein air workshops, this in-depth guide to all aspects of landscape painting is a must-have for anyone getting started in the genre, as well as more experienced practitioners who want to hone their skills or learn new perspectives.




Artful Teaching


Book Description

Both a practitioner’s guide and a school reform model, the new edition of this popular book shares exemplary arts-integration practices across the K–8 curriculum. Rather than providing formulas or scripts to be followed, each chapter carefully describes how the arts offer an entry point for gaining insight into why and how students learn to assist teachers in developing their own philosophy and practice. This updated second edition features scholarship and art at the forefront of contemporary practice and addresses social justice issues such as racial, climate, and economic justice. Chapter authors provide concrete ideas along with lively examples of public-school teachers integrating visual arts, music, drama, and dance with subject matter that includes English, social studies, science, and mathematics. The bookÕs narrative approach makes arts integration accessible and understandable to novice and experts alike. Readers of this new edition will come away with a deeper understanding of why and how to use the arts every day, in every school, to reach every child. Book Features: Explains how arts integration across the K–8 curriculum contributes to student learning.Features examples of how integrated arts education functions in classrooms when it is done well. Introduces historical and contemporary artists whose work is transdisciplinary. Brings together and speaks to diverse stakeholders, including classroom teachers, teaching artists, school administrators, and teacher educators. Explores intensive teacher-education and principal-training programs now underway in several higher education institutions. “A thorough guide to integrating art into other disciplinary subjects . . . recommended.” —SchoolArts (for first edition)




John Dewey and the Artful Life


Book Description

Aesthetic experience has had a long and contentious history in the Western intellectual tradition. Following Kant and Hegel, a human’s interaction with nature or art frequently has been conceptualized as separate from issues of practical activity or moral value. This book examines how art can be seen as a way of moral cultivation. Scott Stroud uses the thought of the American pragmatist John Dewey to argue that art and the aesthetic have a close connection to morality. Dewey gives us a way to reconceptualize our ideas of ends, means, and experience so as to locate the moral value of aesthetic experience in the experience of absorption itself, as well as in the experience of reflective attention evoked by an art object.