🌻🌻🌻 Love is in the Air 🌻🌻🌻

Hi Everyone I bring you this week my February Beatles lyric,  which I'm sure you all know : All you need is love, love, Love is all you need Way back in 1987, my wonderful mum introduced me to the legendary poet Maya Angelou, we watched her mesmerising, and spell-binding performance of a live poetry reading in Lewisham Hippodrome. This was a profound experience for me, her magical, mystical and lyrical performance spun songs and stories of Love……..friend love, agape love, romantic love, self love, sensual love and familial love!  A beautiful journey through her own work and black American poetry. Watch Maya in Lewisham This particular phrase has always stuck with me and you may have heard me use it sometimes in workshops, “ Be careful when a naked person offers you his shirt.” …  I usually ask people what this says to them and I think Brene Brown paraphrases it very beautifully: “Love is not something we give or get; it is something that we nurture and grow, a connection that can only be cultivated between two people when it exists within each one of them – we can only love others as much as we love ourselves.” In other words to give love, we have to love ourselves.

I mention all of this as we head towards February, a month in which we celebrate love. Apparently the first Valentines day was in the year 496! Originating from a Roman Festival, Lupercalia, the start of springtime. Later on, the church morphed this festival into a Christian celebration and used it to remember St Valentine. His name started to be used by people to express their feelings to those they loved………As the years went on, Chaucer and Shakespeare romanticised it and it gained popularity throughout Europe. Handmade paper cards became the tokens-du-jour in the Middle Ages. At Wild at Art in February we will be celebrating the spirit of love and self love by creating our own “Tokens Du Jour “.

Reflect and Replenish  Self Care for Counsellors, Therapists, Life Coaches, and Teachers Monthly on Thursdays:  February 6th, March 26th,  April 23rd 6:00pm - 8:30pm $450.00 includes all art materials I would like to invite you to the very first Reflect and Replenish workshop at Wild at Art Studio.  This is a professional development and Creative Self Care group for counsellors, art therapists, school counsellors, teachers and life coaches. In our role we may be advocating self care for our clients or students, but its easy to forget about US! as people who spend our working hours caring for others.  We KNOW that Self-care is important to maintain a healthy relationship with ourselves, to reduce stress, to replenish our capacity to provide compassion and empathy but knowing it and practicing it can be hard !  Life is busy, with multiple demands on our time !

Diving Deeper Retreat Days Saturday 8th February  9.00-5.00pm Studio29, Lamma Island $1,200 inc scrumptious lunch and treats Only 2 places left! Exploring personal stories through art making can help us to reframe challenges, develop new perspectives and articulate our inner world. Come and use your art-making to listen inside! Working on personal themes, you will be guided to experience mixed media art journaling. It can be the start of a transformational journey as you uncover insights and find ways to let your inner voice show you the way.

Self Love Mandalas Thursday 13th February 6.008.30pm $450 Wild at Art Studio, Central  This workshop is scheduled right before St Valentines day to maximise on the power of our shared LOVE energy! It's a day all about love, and guess where it starts? Yes, with YOU! This workshop is a gift day just for you, to pause and relax into some self compassion and affection! We'll be focusing on self care, self love and self nurture. Listening to some of our favourite love songs and responding with a gorgeous Mandala straight from your heart chakra! You can if you wish, dedicate your mandala to the significant other in your life, as well. Come and join the lovely community of art makers at Wild at Art Studio and feel the LOVE!

Mindful Drawing 4 x Wednesday mornings 9.30-12.00pm 15th, 22nd January, 5th, 12th, February $400 Connect with yourself and all your senses through Mindful Drawing. This beautiful experience  helps you to reconnect with the simple moments in life, brings a sense of peace and enjoyment, as you re-kindle your creativity and grow your drawing  confidence. Both mindfulness and drawing require you to slow down and pay close attention to what's in front of you.  These workshops introduce you to the idea of inhabiting the present moment, as you observe your sensations and experiences and pay attention to all of your senses – You will be fully guided through a range of drawing experiences and materials, no previous art experience is required!

Botanical Painting and Drawing Earth Love Saturday 15th February ( 9.30am - 5.00pm) with the amazing Claire Kirk at Wild at Art Studio, Central $1,400 inc all art materials, scrumptious treats throughout the day Only 4 places left!  Noticing small moments in nature can keep us connected to the earth even though we dwell in the big city. This workshop will take us on a creative journey starting with some playful dabbing experiments as we create different backgrounds for our masterpieces. Claire will then lead us through mindfulness drawing and painting activities to help us capture natures lines, patterns and spirit. on paper. You will connect with nature as you absorb yourself in the natural forms and recreate these using drawing pen. Beginners will be gentle coached through the drawing process and those more advanced artists can enjoy waking up or building on those skills. If you are an Art Journaler this is a perfect technique for you to use in your daily journals.

Welcome to your own creative self! Come on in .... Artfully Yours from 🌻🌻🌻Katie 🌻🌻🌻

🌻🌻🌻 2020 Art courses for you ! 🌻🌻🌻

Hi Everyone Thank you Thank you Thank you for being part of the 2019 Wild at Art Journey. It all exists because of YOU !  It’s been a heartwarming year for me, witnessing you create and discover and fill the WAA Studio in Elgin St with your presence. Last January 1st I hadn’t quite formulated the gorgeous studio that I have now, but I had established the need to Flourish and Grow off and out from my Lamma Studio somehow, Flourishing was loud and clear on my Vision Board as you can see !   “You may say I’m a dreamer, but I’m not the only one”   Being a dreamer in this world can feel large and even scary. We have big beautiful dreams and we are learning to live them out loud, through our artmaking we are helping them to blossom and grow.  I am truly inspired by how many of you are ready to create your own visions at the 2020 Vision! workshops this month as we expand our Wild at Art Community and spread the practice of self empowerment through art. “I wish you captivating adventures that help weave together diverse threads of your experience, inspiring you to fall in love with life again and again.” ( Rob Brezsny)  Falling in love with life might feel like bridge too far sometimes, but taking the time to ponder and envision YOUR own story through your art means that you really are embracing the fact that we can create our own realities and a life to love.   Finding your own Voice I am also excited by how many of you are eager to process, understand and shape your own life through your Art Journaling practice.  Creating our own realities is just a page away.  If you are yearning to be creative or if your head is full of ideas but you are feeling a bit stuck ? !  Come and enjoy these two January workshops. Joyous Journaling Play Mondays 6.00-8.30pm 13th and 20th January TBC 6.00-8.30 pm $400 PP Come and play with colour, paint and texture to make papers and pages for your journal!  Create yourself a range of journal papers as you experiment with stencils, printmaking, and other mark making techniques to start your 2020 journaling year!  During these two sessions you can decide how to take your journaling forwards and find out how to build a manageable weekly habit of creative journaling as you find your own style and pathway ! Are you ready to slow down and use all your senses as you make art? Mindful Drawing 4 x Wednesday mornings 9.30-12.00pm 15th, 22nd January, 5th, 12th, February $400 Mindful Drawing helps you to reconnect with the simple moments in life, brings a sense of peace and enjoyment, as you re-kindle your creativity and grow your drawing  confidence. Both mindfulness and drawing require you to slow down and pay close attention to what's in front of you.  These workshops introduce you to the idea of inhabiting the present moment, as you observe your sensations and experiences and pay attention to all of your senses – You will be fully guided through a range of drawing experiences and materials, no previous art experience is required. January also sees the start of  New courses at the studio including: Reflect and Restore workshops Diving Deeper SaturdayJournaling opportunities. All dates and details are on the webpage. http://wildatartstudio.blogspot.com/p/wild-at-art-studio-offerings.html Booking for all workshops can be made directly to me on: wildatartweekly@gmail.com See here for map and directions http://wildatartstudio.blogspot.com/p/contact-me.html Welcome to your own creative self! Come on in .... Artfully Yours from Katie

A whole new decade!

Hi Everyone 2020 is right around the corner my friends. Not just the end of a year but the end of a decade! At Wild at Art we tap into the energies of the season and so in January we focus upon the New Year and seek out what deep soul dreams are calling us for the year ahead. We look at our yearnings, visions and goals as we help those come to life. The hands on art-making of a Vision Board helps our inner thoughts and wishes become visible which gives us an opportunity to see what we desire and what we need. By using our hands to manifest what is in our head and heart we create a powerful conduit for change. With paint, collage and design details, we will bring to life our very own Vision Board. For some of you this is an annual ritual as we share your previous boards and marvel at the many magical moments.

Roz’s Dreams And Visions Story! In January 2019 I created a collage with Katie that was deeply heartfelt but being kept deep inside. It wasn't until I was at the workshop that I realised this desire and created a beautiful orange papaya filled with the seeds of the future. We were provided with magical collage materials so perfect for my dreams and before I knew it, I'd created a perfect symbol for the life I'd been aching for. This is powerful medicine indeed and being administered by the best Art Surgeon in town! Dreams are so important! As the famous song goes, "If you don't have a dream, how you gonna have a dream come true?" so I highly recommend Katie Flowers and her Wild At Art event. I've been going every year and love the process of bringing visions into being and bringing those deep desires of the heart into consciousness and making them more visible for ourselves to focus on. Once we have articulated and created an image of something, it's far easier for the subconscious to aid us in reaching the goal. Here's my papaya :

Come and join us for one of the 3 x 2020 Vision! workshop dates : Saturday 11th  9.30am -1.00pm ( $550)  4 x places left Thursday 16th  6.00-9.00pm (Full) Saturday 18th 9.30am -1.00pm (Full) You will meet our lovely Wild at Art Community of creative’s for this blessed annual event! All of your pre prepared booklets and art materials are most lovingly provided.

Vision Board Magic is REAL! Above you can see the the 2002 Vision Board that I created at the start of a one-year counseling course. As well as it being a place of gratitude for the strong amazing people and presence that I already had in my life at that time, you can see I was definitely seeking a lovely chap, a bigger home and seemingly a few fish! ? Those of you who know me well, will know that I met Mr S on the last day of that one year counseling course......we subsequently moved into the Po Wah Yuen house pictured bottom right on the board, and of course Mr S is an ardent fisherman......nuff said! Its good to be specific sometimes even if you don't know why!

January also sees the start of  New courses at the studio including: Mid Week Mindful Sketching Reflect and Restore workshops Three Art Journaling opportunities. All dates and details are on the webpage. http://wildatartstudio.blogspot.com/p/wild-at-art-studio-offerings.html

Booking for all workshops can be made directly to me on: wildatartweekly@gmail.com See here for map and directions http://wildatartstudio.blogspot.com/p/contact-me.html Artfully Yours from Katie

Feel Good Arty Saturdays

Hi Everyone

This week I would like to introduce you to some creative pathways to your very own happiness!  At Wild at Art we know that making art makes YOU feel good and helps you to build and reinforce your Happy Habits! If you are a practicing art maker you will have already experienced your Happy Hormones being triggered in a few ways as you make and create !

Here’s a short neurobiological guide to your body and your art :

The joy of anticipation! That wonderful “ feel-good hormone ” dopamine surges in anticipation before you actually start your hands on art making, your brain and body know that you are about to experience a reward trigger, this can help you to concentrate and to maintain motivation as you focus on your art making just by signing up to a workshops at WAA you can start to feel good!

At the same time when we actually engage in hands on activities, there are specific parts of the brain that are affected and this is thought to increase  the chemical messenger serotonin that acts as our mood stabilizer.  That in turn helps with the stress hormone, cortisol, which as we already know, is public health enemy number one !

I chatted a few weeks ago about ways that elevated cortisol levels interfere with learning and memory, as well lowering our immune function, it can elevate blood pressure and can lead to heart disease... But guess what ?  Art making can actually reduce our cortisol levels as we engage in self-regulating activities such as doodling, drawing, making mandalas and other  kinds of art making that takes us to what we call a FLOW state !

Last of all our cuddle hormone oxytocin is triggered when we are in a ‘herd’ and trust is formed, so come and join the Wild at Art ‘herd’ and enjoy your oxytocin boost and your endorphin rush as you laugh, chat and make friends in a community and atmosphere of fun and creativity !

So you see there are many reasons to come and enjoy our Feel Good Arty Saturday workshops each month………….they are very very good for your health !  

Why not come and sign up for the marvellous Geli Plate printing workshops with Jules white on the 12th October.

Its a half day workshop and it will give you a fabulous flavour of the play and experimentation inherent in printmaking, the what ifs and "I wonders" of making art ! This workshop is a fun way to make images and if you are an Art Journaler then you can make backgrounds for your journal pages as well. 

As Jules says :

Gelli printing takes mixed media art to the next level. creating your own one-off and unique work. You will be layering colours and including multiple textures. There is not a right or wrong way to create these works, and I will guide you through the process. Let your imagination run wild, and come and explore the fabulous art of Gelli printing.

Saturday 12th October 

10.00-12.30

$400 per person inc all materials
Register now with me on

wildatartweekly@gmail.com

Jules is the Elementary Art Teacher at Carmel International School, she has also taught in Shanghai and Bangkok, her classroom is fabulous and her approach is accessible to everyone no matter what your starting point ! Do come and join us for this Feel Good Saturday ! 

Artfully Yours

from

Katie 

The Iceberg.........

Hi Everyone Welcome to Wild at Art news;  This week I'd like to talk a little bit about one of my favourite metaphorical images: the Iceberg. I use the Iceberg as an image to explain the unconscious mind and its relationship to the conscious mind. Many of us spend much of our waking hours up there in cognitive brain, which represents that small part of the iceberg visible above the surface of the water. Whereas down under the surface, the most powerful part, the unconscious mind, remains that unseen huge mass below the water: the place of our memories, feelings and thoughts that are just out of conscious awareness. Everything we have seen or smelled, dreamed or worried about, every muscle memory and pre conscious experience is stored in that deep deep filing system!

The exciting part, is that right at the water line of our metaphoric iceberg is where we imagine and dream. We could say that our imagination is rather like a membrane through which processes happening in the unconscious mind come into conscious awareness. Our dreams and our art making practice allow access to those deeper realms. As Art Therapist Sean McNiff says "Depth is on the Surface"! Imagination is a slightly elusive word isn't it,  perhaps nearly as difficult to define succinctly as the word love. ……it’s our place of possibility, our playground of what ifs…..its how we form new ideas, or images or concepts of external objects not yet present to the senses……..its the seat of our creativity. Next week at the studio we see the launch of two exciting initiatives. Not just one, but TWO Katie’s who bring you some powerful and magical techniques to lead you straight to the seat of your creativity, would you like to safely take some diving lessons and discover ways to access the messages and stories which are just below the surface? Come and reconnect with your own imaginal realm....the place where all is possible and we can bring something previously unseen into reality.

Creative Depth Coach Katie Larson bring us “Vision-Quest: A Conscious Journey”. This is a 4-week  deep-dive into all aspects of the self. We will meet on 4 consecutive Tuesday evenings in September to discover how to create visual maps of our conscious experiences. Katie will help us to devise a translation dictionary so that we can reconnect with our symbolic-world and we will also create a card deck that captures aspects of US! Through art making, we will capture exactly what we have been longing to know….   Vision-Quest: A Conscious Journey Articulating the self through creativity brought to you by the wise and insightful Katie Larson 6.30 - 9.00pm Starting next Tuesday 3rd  -24th September ( 4 x weeks) $1,500 for 4 classes inc all materials Follow your inner artist on a Vision-Quest deep inside yourself. Explore your unconscious and discover the colours, patterns, and symbols buried within. Play with mixed media--paint, pencils, pastels, and collage--and bring visual form to your non-verbal knowings. Create a dictionary to bridge the gap between your verbal and symbolic world. Design a card deck showing the wide spectrum of your persona, and create beautiful 3D models of "The Big Picture" (the universe as you know it) and "The Small Picture" (your whole self as you know it).

The next " Intro to Art Journaling" course starts on Wednesday: Find your Voice Introduction to Visual Art Journaling 6.00-8.30pm Wednesdays 4th, 11th, 18th, 25th Sept 9th, 16th Oct Register with me on wildatartweekly@gmail.com Exploring personal stories through art making can help us to reframe challenges, develop new perspectives and articulate our inner world. Come and use your art-making to listen inside! Working on personal themes you will be guided to experience mixed media art journaling. It can be the start of a transformational journey as you uncover insights and find ways to let your inner voice show you the way. " One of the best gifts I ever gave myself was signing up for your art journaling course last year. Highly recommend!!! "  says Ilene Appel Levy

I look forwards to greeting you very soon at the Wild at Art Door! Artfully Yours from Katie

🌻🌻🌻 Are you ready to Loosen Up ?🌻🌻🌻

Hi Everyone Welcome to this weeks Wild at Art news. Have you ever heard yourself say these words?  “I can’t even draw a straight line, I wish I could do art, but I was no good at school!” Sound even slightly familiar? Isn’t it hard to get back to hands on stuff, when we are beguiled by these myriad devices, such as the one I am writing to you on right now! My loved laptop! But there is a yearning, I hear it all the time, a longing…and this may also seem familiar. People desire to reconnect with hands on artmaking, in all sorts of ways and we are slowly getting past the notion that only certain “gifted”  people can make art ! Of course there are many reasons to create and we are often motivated by different drives, we may desire to represent an object in a sketch, or we may need to draw a diagram to better understand something, other times we just want to doodle and drop into the quiet place of our flow state.

Often just starting with the sheer joy of playing with materials, just like our younger selves did, can lead us right where we need to be ….and can be a direct hotline to the imaginal realm and that’s where the GOLD is! Interacting with various art media stimulates the primal areas of our brain. We can engage in a purely sensory experience, the process can be rhythmic, tactile, and sensual. Sometimes functioning at this level can allow us access to memories or to exploring our emotions.  So I have chosen to bring the Loosen Up process which provides this  approach, to our weekday artists, since people kept returning on Saturdays to do it again and again! So what do we do? We get to use all of our senses as artmaking prompts…..we listen, we touch and we close our eyes!  We explore line, colour, texture and layering techniques to see what our intuitive self responds to and is drawn to. We seek out some of your own personal motifs and symbols, and mostly we experience play….experiment and letting go. This is pure sensory pleasure and a wonderful way to learn more about YOU !

Loosen Up Painting  Mornings Wednesday 31st July-  Aug-21st 9.30-12.00am Be bold! Be Brave! $1,500 for 4 x classes incuding all materials Come and find your own inner artistic voice by exploring line, colour, texture and layering techniques to create intuitive paintings which will change and evolve over time ! You will be encouraged to be bold and fearless, to experiment with colours, to explore your mark making vocabulary, to find out how take creative risks and decisions, while allowing a process to unfold. Yes, come and trust the process, let whatever it is GO!! and follow your intuition.

!!!!!  Resuming this Wednesday !!!!!  at the Wild at Art Studio Lunchtime Destress Doodling  12.30-2.00pm Wednesdays $150 per session Do you sometimes feel it’s all just too much? WhatsApp me for the door code and come on in!

Our very next Art Journaling course starts in one month : Find your Voice Introduction to Visual Art Journaling 6.00-8.30pm Wednesdays NEW GROUP 4th September- 16th October ( 6 x weeks) Register with me on wildatartweekly@gmail.com

Vision-Quest: A Conscious Journey Articulating the self through creativity brought to you by the wise and insightful Katie Larson 6.30 - 9.00pm Tuesdays 3rd  -24th September ( 4 x weeks) $1,500 for 4 classes inc all materials Follow your inner artist on a Vision-Quest deep inside yourself. Explore your unconscious and discover the colors, patterns, and symbols buried within. Play with mixed media--paint, pencils, pastels, and collage--and bring visual form to your non-verbal knowings. Create a dictionary to bridge the gap between your verbal-world and symbolic world. Design a card deck showing the wide spectrum of your persona, and create beautiful 3D models of "The Big Picture" (the universe as you know it) and "The Small Picture" (your whole self as you know it).

I look forwards to greeting you very soon at the Wild at Art Door! Artfully Yours from Katie