Spiritual Healing thru ART

Welcome to an artful method of healing!

I still consider myself new in the community of Miami as of almost 2 years.  I have been an artist all my life, schooling and living in Santa Barbara, California and after 28 years there, I am more at home here in two years. I grew up in Brasil, from Argentinian parents and born in America.  I have been a tropical landscape artist specializing in collage and making my own papers to work with, using the traditional Japanese Papermaking technique for 24 years.  Art is all I have ever done!  What a blessing! The changes started in 2007 and soon Art became also a healing tool for me. I got caught in a life crisis during the long lasting financial crisis and a 5 year Sabbatical led me through an introspective artistic period that coincided with the departure of the fruitful tropical niche artwork, which so defined me. I was exploring new media and came upon a heart that I pinched out from crinkling grocery paper bags. The lights went on!  I began using these hearts as an art form and eventually they became a tool for the healing journey.

Many paintings on hearts followed, each with a theme, a prayer or an intention, and this became the beginning of my new workshop,

PAINT YOUR HEART OUT.

The one on the picture above, A Heart in Christ,  was painted recently as I was looking for a Logo for this side of the workshop and because I really have found that my life goes better when I pray before anything I do.  I need Christ that much.

I began sharing it with kids, teens, men and women, and saw some amazing results.  People were being asked to get in touch with their hearts, something more sensitive, more intimate, a surprise for most, but a delightful one. Some people brought hard stories and I encouraged that because I have been thru a lot myself and developed a great sense of awareness and compassion. I have experimented with many healing practices and none came so close to healing me as did powerful prayer and surrendering to God’s will.  It became an tool to start a healing process, for students to think, write, talk and practice self expression, giving a voice to feelings that may have never been fully expressed and encouraging them to develop a greater personal relationship with God.  Transformation and healing is the goal. Acknowledging it is the first step.  It was for me, anyway. I realized I held a lot of things inside and came to experience the detrimental dis-ease of that behavior. I now want to help others identify a starting point, help them thru their difficulties, offer further healing by encouraging them to bring back their painted hearts, if I feel there is a need, and through however many sessions it takes, get that painted heart to reflect the healing instead of the initial pain.