Learn to play with your bright shadow as a resource for creative energy through transformational, large-format painting. This approach creates deep encounters with archetypes that can change how you perceive yourself. Use a somatic approach through the intimate energies of mark making and the use of color, shape, and texture, and explore various tools and collage. Focus on body sensations, rather than your mental perceptions. This is a playful, empowering experience for beginners, and can offer the opportunity to loosen habitual techniques and perspectives for more advanced students. With an emphasis on play and experimentation, you will stretch old concepts as you explore the creative process. You will take home your large-format painting of mixed media collage and markings as an expression of your personal journey through the creative process.

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If you are exhausted by the intense and conflicting emotions 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. My trust in basic integrity and plain kindness in humanity has been shaken. Combined with the vision of what will emerge from the inevitable deconstruction, it has brought forth a paradoxical situation of unacknowledged and unexpressed emotions that want attention. It feels like grief, a complex set of emotions.

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

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

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.

Several workshops are coming up through Cabrillo Arts Extension.

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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

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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.