If you are exhausted by intense and conflicting emotions from the collective angst of our time, you might want to consider this painting workshop.

Recently, I realized emotional conflict was at the bottom of my exhaustion, anger, and confusion. It is related to a loss of trust, basic integrity, and plain kindness in humanity, which has been shaken. Mixed with the vision of what can emerge from a deconstruction has brought forth a paradoxical situation of unacknowledged and unexpressed emotions that want attention. It feels like grief, a complex set of emotions with layers of unrecognized experience.

 Through the creative process, we will explore the five paradoxes of grief:

• depth of loss is the depth of love
• going backward to go forward
• holding both sadness and joy
• holding on and letting go
• feeling the pain is the cure

The creative process with large-format Transformational Painting is a safe place to explore new possibilities. Feeling the pain is not a silver bullet cure, but it does renew our emotional resilience to bring us out of denial & reactive anger.

Register Here

Fridays, from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m.

On-going painting circle, call for drop-in

$260 includes four times, all materials

Large format acrylic mixed media painting

Are you interested in discovering the difference between doing and being through painting? –shifting from perceptions of a reality where you have little control as a perceived center of the world, while at the same time being seriously separate from much of life? This large, bold painting project can introduce you to an identity of partnership, creativity, and even kinship that has the potential to expand your identity and reality.

Come to Anavami Studio on the Westside off Swift St. to join a large-format acrylic painting project. There will be little technical instruction, but unique approaches with various materials designed to develop trust in your own process. There will be no critiques, as shared personal reflections pushing the edges of consensus reality are more interesting and impactful to other painters. Experiments like this in the past three years have proven empowering for participants, inspiring confidence and creativity not only in the visual arts but also in cooking, other daily activities, intimate relationships like child rearing, partnerships, and business negotiations, resulting in new visions of creativity and self-identity.

We will paint on 3’ X 5’ industrial paper with acrylic paint and various materials and implements. Drop-in is $65, and four sessions will be $260 a month. Call Majio with any questions at 831 420-1349

Click Here To Register Online

One of the twenty marking approaches introduced in the first week of each set widens the bandwidth of possibilities outside regular thinking, perceiving, and doing. The process cultivates innovative thinking through the development of new awareness. We will begin the first week of each month by making vocabulary to be used in paintings.

Here are some of the approaches we will explore to shift relationships to habitual reality:

Monoprints on tissue paper to be used for layering images with paintings. We will create various printing masks made from shadow projection and other ways, making stamps and stencils to incorporate into the painting.

Invisible marks are made by changing the paper surface or with clear modeling paste to create marks and texture that are not clearly visible until the paint touches the surface. Because there is little conscious control, spontaneity and authenticity develop in the process, opening unconsidered nuances.

Collected rubbings from textured surfaces combined in the painting process have proved to add subtle fields of emotion, like adding a new musical instrument to a band.

Asemic Writing or writing without semantic meaning, is a hybrid art form that fuses text and image into a unity, opening arbitrary subjective interpretations. Marking is a language exchange with the world in subtle and dramatic forms. To turn everyday writing communication into a visual rhythm and pattern, either as a collage or directly on the substrate, offers an evocative element to painting.

Daily creative practices help us consider a relationship to the world of belonging rather than anthropocentric separation.