Celebrate The Healing Power of ART: 07/01/2010

Welcome! The purpose of "Celebrate The Healing Power of ART", founded by Renee Phillips, Director of Manhattan Arts International, is to Promote ART and all aspects of CREATIVITY and its vital importance to healing individuals and the planet. We believe that when Artists create healing Art they not only experience a healing process within themselves, their Art also has a healing impact on viewers.

Please also visit The Artrepreneur Coach blog and our Manhattan Arts International website.
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Monday, July 19, 2010

Creative Arts and Aging Network: 6 "Must Reads" if you work in Aging services or Lifelong Learning

Editor's Note: I'd like to recommend this article on a wonderful blog created by Creative Arts and Aging Network at http://artfulaging.blogspot.com I quote here from their mission statement: "CAAN exists to promote avenues and opportunities for all elders, artists and people in the aging network to explore the arts and humanities as a means of life enhancement."
Creative Arts and Aging Network: 6 "Must Reads" if you work in Aging services or Lifelong Learning

Sunday, July 11, 2010

National Center for Creative Aging

Creative Expression and Healthy Aging

Editor's Note: Aging is a natural human process that, if we are fortunate, we will all experience in the best of health. How inspiring is is to know that an extraordinary organization The National Center for Creative Aging exists with this belief: "The arts can serve as a powerful way to engage elders in a creative and healing process of self-expression, enabling them to create works that honor their life experience."

If you follow this blog you already know about the powerful benefits of art. I encourage you to visit the NCCA web site at http://www.creativeaging.org/ and discover the brilliant work they are doing. You will also find a wealth of resources on their web site. Spread the word about them. Get involved, become a member, and help them help our society!

About National Center for Creative Aging
The National Center for Creative Aging (NCCA) was founded in 2001 and is dedicated to fostering an understanding of the vital relationship between creative expression and healthy aging and to developing programs that build on this understanding.

The process of aging is a profound experience marked by increasing physical and emotional change and a heightened search for meaning and purpose. Creative expression is important for older people of all cultures and ethnic backgrounds, regardless of economic status, age, or level of physical, emotional, or cognitive functioning. The arts can serve as a powerful way to engage elders in a creative and healing process of self-expression, enabling them to create works that honor their life experience.

Since its establishment, the NCCA has provided research and development, public policy and advocacy, information and referral as well as education and training in the form of on-site symposia and forums as well as distance learning webinars to individuals and organizations working in direct service with older adults.

NCCA provides free individual membership and maintains a connection through this network through the NCCA e-newsletter that provides up-to-date information on creativity and aging, funding announcements, events and conferences as well as access to training materials and other resources.

Mailing Address:National Center for Creative Aging
4125 Albemearle Street, NW, Washington, DC 20016

Phone: (202) 895-9456

Fax:(202) 895-9483

Email: info@creativeaging.org

Website: http://www.creativeaging.org/

For Membership: membership@creativeaging.org

Words of Inspiration

"Variety of form and brilliancy of color in the object presented to patients are an actual means of recovery."
~ Florence Nightingale

"In order to create there must be a dynamic force, and what force is more potent than love?"
~ Ivor Stravinsky

"I saw the angel in the marble and carved until I set him free."
~ Michelangelo

"Art washes away from the soul the dust of every day life."
~ Pablo Picasso

"If I create from the heart, nearly everything works: if from the head, almost nothing." ~ Marc Chagall

"Art is not a thing but a Moving Spirit." ~ George Innes

"'Painting' and 'religious experience' are the same thing. It is a question of the perpetual motion of a right idea."
~ Ben Nicholson

"Each energy calls for its complementary energy to achieve self-contained stability based on the play of energies."
~ Paul Klee

"In our life there is a single color, as on an artist's palette, which provides the meaning of life and art. It is the color of love." ~ Marc Chagall

"A work of art is finished, from the point of view of the artist, when feeling and perception have resulted in a spiritual synthesis." ~ Hans Hofmann

"I look out the window sometimes to seek the color of the shadows and the different greens in the trees, but when I get ready to paint I just close my eyes and imagine a scene." ~ Grandma Moses

"In art the hand can never execute anything higher than the heart can inspire." ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

"Art does not reproduce what we see. It makes us see." ~ Paul Klee

"We live in succession, in division, in parts, in particles. Meantime within man is the soul of the whole; the wise silence; the universal beauty, to which every part and particle is equally related, the eternal ONE. And this deep power in which we exist and whose beatitude is all accessible to us, is not only self-sufficing and perfect in every hour, but the act of seeing and the thing seen, the seer and the spectacle, the subject and the object, are one. We see the world piece by piece, as the sun, the moon, the animal, the tree; but the whole, of which these are shining parts, is the soul."
~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

"The heart of creativity is an experience of the mystical union; the heart of the mystical union is an experience of creativity." ~ Julia Cameron

"Creativity advances through works that bring about the artists' continuing self-creating." ~ Garry Wills

"Art is the expression of the profoundest thoughts in the simplest way."
~ Albert Einstein

"Art and business may be strange bedfellows, but an artist must make room in bed for both." ~ Eric Maisel

"It is art, and art only, that reveals us to ourselves." ~ Oscar Wilde

"Color is like cooking. The cook puts in more or less salt, that's the difference."
~ Josef Albers

"The job of the artist is always to deepen the mystery." ~ Frances Bacon

"Art is a collaboration between God and the artist, and the less the artist does the better." ~ Andre Gide

"An artist has been defined as a neurotic who continually cures himself with his art."
~ Lee Simonson

Inspiring Quotes by Artists

The Universe, this planet and every plant and animal life force upon it survives on one overriding principle - the 'CREATIVE' principle. Human artistic endeavour is Nature's highest form of this principle. It is always in direct contrast to human sickness and destruction. Our physical,intellectual and spiritual progress is founded on this fact. If we do not create - we suffer and die!
~ Keith Morant

"My Art work is inspired by giving a voice to children who have been abused that do not have a voice. The art I do addresses the silence around sexual abuse that allows the perpetrator to continue. I also believe that the artist and the viewer enter into a mutual healing process as the art is made and looked at. Art is able to contravene our belief system and hit us in our emotions with a visceral reaction. This reaction can then affect the individuals thoughts and awareness which can then change societal norms. Silence is not golden."
~ Linda Litteral

"My creativity centres mostly around seeing/feeling/exploring the tension, the power and the passion in and between firmness and dissolution, structure and creative chaos, between immobility and movement, lightness and weight. To feel the challenge in the visualization, the watching and a wish to see behind, beyond the artistic expression. I think it is about challenging your visualization, re-evaluing, overthrowing, setting the room into rotation and seeing if something new appears and allowing the artistic expression to work outside its known context."
~ Gunilla Lofgren

Pages

Monday, July 19, 2010

Creative Arts and Aging Network: 6 "Must Reads" if you work in Aging services or Lifelong Learning

Sunday, July 11, 2010

National Center for Creative Aging