Writing from The Heart: Turning 360 Degrees inside A Painting

Writing from The Heart

"Writing from The Heart" is a workshop on creative writing, creative drawing, and creative drama. There are three available versions of this workshop: one for beginners on the secondary, tertiary, and graduate levels, and another for practitioners. A third version of this workshop is designed as an outreach program to disadvantaged and underserved audiences such as the disabled, the poor and the marginalized, victims of human trafficking, battered women and abused children, drug rehabilitation center residents, child combatants, children in conflict with the law, prisoners, and gang leaders. This third version incorporates creativity and problem awareness, conflict resolution, crisis intervention, trauma therapy, and peacemaking.

Thursday, January 9, 2025

Turning 360 Degrees inside A Painting

Saint Sebastian is one of the most mysterious subjects in painting. He is always depicted as a handsome young man, albeit with a deadpan expression his face, seemingly oblivious of the paint dealt by the arrows in his body and apparently distracted by something--what?--outside and beyonf the canvas he is painted on.

What is holding Saint Sebastian's attention?

Close your eyes, take deep breaths and slowly count to 20, and then step inside the painting. Then, using your imagination, turn 360 degrees inside the painting and observe everything around you,.

Are there other characters inside the painting? Who are they and what do they look like? What are they saying? Are they interactive images, i.e. do they see you and react to your presence as though they were ghosts? Or are they non-interative, like memorymemory traces in ether?

As for yourself, what are you feeling? What are you thinking?

Slowly count to twenty once again, take deepe breaths, and open your eyes. You may then take down notes as though emerging from a dream, if you like.

I used to conduct this exercise with my students employing the major and minor arcana of Tarot cards, but the images encountered within those tended to have an Alice-in-Wonderland, surreal, quality.