Visual Arts

We are all artists. Children are natural expressive arts therapists -- they draw, sing, dance and play with marvelous spontaneity. The oldest record of human awareness is the cave drawings of primitive humans. Art is our birthright. Our culture works hard to repress this, to shame it out of us all, but it is always there, available to us.

The beauty of expressive arts therapy is that we embrace the process, without worrying about the "quality" of the final product. It's not about skill as a visual artist, but rather the process of art-making.

Any engagement with visual imagery is a way of working with the visual arts. This can be anything from picking out a postcard with an image that seems powerful at the moment, to making a collage, to drawing, sculpting or making masks.

The left brain is the verbal part of the brain, while the right brain is primarily visual. Working with images can be a powerful way to contain, represent and work through powerful material that is not ready for conscious awareness. It is especially useful for working with trauma, helping to reintegrate the traumatic memory in ways simply not possible through conventional talk therapy. And let's not forget that art is fun!

In terms of the four dimensions of expressive arts, the visual arts have great aesthetic distance -- the artwork is "out there" and easy to maintain distance from, which paradoxically makes it a safe way to express and work through painful and powerful material. Visual arts generally have a low embodiment, though clay sculpting can be an intensely embodied experience and some drawing media (oil and chalk pastels, charcoals, and especially finger paints) are highly tactile. Visual arts lend themselves to metaphor, and even when they are literal representations still hold onto a metaphorical quality because of the way the brain processes images. And the visual arts have a high degree of holding -- the page itself functions as an extra container, which allows it to hold expressions of material that might be too powerful for verbal expression.

Interventions

Here are a few interventions using the visual arts:

• Art card check-in -- select a postcard with an evocative image, and talk about that image.
  
• Shared drawing -- give each person a different colored crayon, and have entire group draw on the same page. This is a great intervention for families; it provides so much information about the family dynamics, both from observing the process and looking at the resulting drawing
• Mask-making -- masks are astonishingly powerful metaphors; you could organize an entire group around the process of making masks and working with them
• Scribble drawing -- one person makes a brief scribble, the other person finds an image in the scribble and completes the picture. Very fast and fun, a visual equivalent of free association
• Body outline collage -- on a large roll of paper, trace the outline of the client with crayon or pencil. Client fills in silhouette with collage material. This is a powerful and evocative process.
  

Photo (c) 2008 Svetlana Kreimer