Celebrate The Healing Power of ART: 01/01/2011

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, January 17, 2011

David Barton, Featured Artist

Arresting Works of Art Initiate A Powerful Dialogue

By Renee Phillips, The Artrepreneur Coach

"My Art represents how I see the world."

Blind Faith, 72" x 42" x 26", reclaimed fiberglass, plastic, wood, metal, rubber, fabric and painted in artist oils. Artwork is copyright protected by the artist. All rights reserved. Do not copy image without the artist's permission.

David Barton's www.bartsarts.com, arresting creatures arouse a myriad of emotional reactions that only an artist of his depth of experience and talent could manifest. After the initial shock we find the tongue in cheek humor in these wondrous figures. If we dare we may see ourselves and our own vulnerabilities in their odd gaze or disfigurement. As all extraordinary art must do, his art initiates a powerful dialog within us and our concepts about beauty, self image, distortion and fear. His art has a lasting profound impact on viewers long after the first encounter for the stories and interpretations they continue to unleash.

David was born in Lowell, Massachusetts in 1963. He is the recipient of the Winner’s Award from The Roosevelt Paper Companies Competition in Painting and Drawing, The Stuart M. Egnal Prize in Painting and The Ernest W. Greenfield Annual Memorial Award in painting. Manhattan Arts International selected his work as one of the winners in the Healing Power of ART 2009-2010 juried competition.

Today Barton is creating a cohesive and powerful body of work, however, he states, “My Life took a detour when I was diagnosed with HIV and AIDS on February 14, 1991. I was 27 at the time. My body and mind soon began to betray me. I was forced to face an assault on my life, yet never saw the perpetrator. I suffered everything from wasting, depression, cancer (three times), suicide attempts, heart failure, splenectomy, homelessness, poverty and the social stigma of the disease."

How he survived and grew stronger is based on his strong positive philosophy. He shares, "What I have learned is that someone, somewhere is much worse off then me. How fortunate I am to have the support of so many. To live in the moment and appreciate all the simple things life has to offer."

He continues, "I have shared this knowledge when publicly speaking on living with AIDS, working as a massage therapist on clients, facilitating classes on safer sex and showing and sharing my art work. I hope to convey that knowledge is power, ignorance is fear and laughter is the best medicine.”

To read an article about David Barton and see more of his work in Manhattan Arts International Reading Room visit http://www.manhattanarts.com/readingroom/ezine/People/Barton.htm

Wednesday, January 12, 2011

Renee Phillips, The Artrepreneur Coach, NYC: Helen P. Shipman, Featured Artist

Helen P. Shipman's Paintings with Writings on The Human Condition

Saturday, January 8, 2011

Judith Olivia HeartSong Inspires Us

Healing Us With Her Talent and Big Heart

By Renee Phillips, The Artrepreneur Coach

Judith Olivia HeartSong will be featured in my upcoming book about Artists Who Transform, Inspire, Take Initiative, Step Outside the Box, Turn Pain into Purpose, and Create Positive Change in the World!

Shown here is a photograph of a very large mural Judith painted at the National Zoo in Washington DC. Judith has had numerous exhibitions and awards, and her work is in many private and public collections.

Art can serve as a catalyst if your mission is to participate in social change. It can provide solace for broken hearts if your mission is to heal. It can make a life burned from hardship and pain more tolerable if you tap into your creative Source and express yourself fully.

There are many outstanding artists who naturally respond to a deep felt mission and purpose using their art as a healing instrument to positively impact the lives of others. There are some individuals that inspire us to be more conscious with their talents and their acts of generosity. Judith Olivia HeartSong is such an artist.

Judith Olivia HeartSong, www.judithheartsong.com, is a painter and muralist who resides in the metropolitan Washington, DC area. She is also a resident artist and teacher at VisArts, www.visarts.org, the Metropolitan Center for the Visual Arts in Rockville, MD, founded on the belief, "There is a creative spirit in all of us that nourishes our humanity and enriches our society. We foster a creative culture that encourages people of all backgrounds, ages and skill levels to explore, participate and experiment in the visual arts."

Shown here is Judith's painting "Stacked Stones I", acrylic on canvas, 60" x 20". Artwork is copyright protected by the artist. All rights reserved. Do not copy image without the artist's permission.

On the home page of her website Judith has written, "I have been working as a professional artist for twenty-nine years now, after a public school education in which my focus was completely art-centric. As a child I was always out in nature, in the woods and along the creek beds of northern Pennsylvania. I developed a sense of awe and respect for the natural world early on and that devotion has never wavered."

Judith shares personal insight into her own healing, "While in therapy for childhood sexual abuse perpetrated by a family member, I started painting intuitively and spontaneously and before long I was having exhibitions." And, in sharing her empathy with others, "I worked with Arnold Palmer Hospital and other organizations in Central Florida to raise awareness for women's and children's issues."

In another gesture to come to aid, Judith designed a shirt for Dick Batchelor's Run for the Children. It turned out that Batchelor gifted one of her paintings to Mrs. Clinton at Mr. Clinton’s first inauguration.

Judith has developed and hosted popular painting workshops for law enforcement professionals, hospital care-givers, and mental health professionals, and she has created and taught numerous programs to serve at-risk teens. In addition Judith has spoken to college classes about art and healing, and has lectured in other venues. She also helps artists learn to network, license art, and do their own public relations work, and has a book in progress.

To view more of her art visit her website at www.judithheartsong.com
Visit her blog at http://judithheartsong.blogspot.com/

Judith Olivia HeartSong will be featured in my upcoming book about Artists Who Transform, Inspire, Take Initiative, Step Outside the Box, Turn Pain into Purpose, and Create Positive Change in the World!

Learn more about this book http://bit.ly/artistsinspire

Tuesday, January 4, 2011

Renee Phillips, The Artrepreneur Coach, NYC: Speak The Truth

Renee Phillips, The Artrepreneur Coach, NYC: Speak The Truth
Doug Auld paints portraits of burn victims. His "State of Grace" series was initially inspired by what he describes as a momentary encounter with an adolescent burn survivor some 30 years ago. Doug is one of the artists featured in my new upcoming book about Artists who Inspire, Transform, and Create Positive Change.

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

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