Isle of Wight Festival Kidzone Collaborations
For the last few years it has been wonderful to be invited to run a collaborative art event in the Kidzone at the Isle of Wight Festival. It is always one of the highlights of the year. I relish it. Two of my long standing students now help and we have a lot of FUN.
My idea for the collaborations was something that had been steadily evolving for many years......
One of the most privileged things that I have experienced during my eleven years of teaching is to join with children and adults in working on THEIR art. I never started off as a teacher with this as my intention. I found my feet with students asking for what THEY needed from me, or something presenting itself very clearly.
One of the very early workshops I did, a lady was very distressed with her work and as she left she crumpled it up and tossed it into the bin. Later that evening I dug it out, smoothed the creases and felt the need to continue with the pastel drawing for several hours until I considered it finished.
The following week I gave it back to her. She was delighted with it and subsequently decided to continue coming to class because her work was worthy. She was worthwhile and she didn't need to be hiding her artistic creations from anyone.
After this I naturally began showing people how to be creative by demonstrating on their own work. It seemed the logical way of doing things. It is impossible to teach art through verbal instruction alone. A student needs to actually see how an artist lays down colour and texture.
I found that it had taken me years of experimentation as a self taught artist, learning my skills, but that I could teach all that I had learned in the blink of an eye, and a young person would absorbed it like a sponge. I found this very exciting.
It took me a long while to realise the fullness of creating with someone on their work.
I now know that I am a spiritual teacher / Lightworker / Starseed. It took me a fair while to realise that this is how it is categorised in our language. I just function as I do - with spirit as my guide.
It is extremely powerful when you are opening a space for a student to work safely with their crown chakra wide open and then the two of you link - as if you are linking energy pathways to spirit.
The action of myself painting in this way causes an immediate 'source energy' feeling of peace to enter the room. Students love it. Many do not understand why it is so restful, hypnotic, relaxing, blissful, comforting. It is because the energy that they recognise from home - spirit - is in the room. I am in the energy, and it has channelled through me into the room.
By working with a student, it is like them hitching a lift in my car.
(carcass, Ka case. Case for my spirit.)
When I do this repetitively with students they get so use to the energy signature that they eventually can do the journey themselves. Even if I am helping someone else with their work, my energy is always leading the group to the point where they need to go.
Eventually a whole group will be able to help each other, and the results will be clearly visible in the ease of creation and clarity of their work.
If a student is suffering emotionally and is stressed, then the others in the group will often struggle to raise up the group vibration as it is like trying to fly a lead ballon.
It has taken a lot of training for me to fly with lead balloons but I now find it relatively easy when I just love painting. There is no trying involved. It is egoless.
The Key Is Love. Passion, and being nowhere else.
This wonderful connection you get when two spirits join lightly is what I wanted others to share. This is why I was so interested in getting people to work together.
The egolessness of working with another when the painting is not yours. You don't own it, so you flow with another's line or colour without trying to control it.
I found this to be a very powerful way of channelling as you are not trying to make the painting anything in particular.
People are in a joyous space because they are having a fulfilling shared experience, where all fears of having to create something with exact form, that actually is something of a third dimensional nature - where this is not required. As a result, people go further into a no mind state.
Further into a meditative state.
The energy becomes nicer and nicer and grabs you into its soothingness.
People swap areas, and work over and round one another, and then the most remarkable thing happens.
When we work in the no mind state, we channel, and from our haphazard doodlings come forms and shapes as in the girl in the painting above. She is walking between the worlds - spirit and earth. This painting is by Dayzii, Josh and myself and I was non verbally, non intentionally teaching them about walking between the worlds.... I had been pondering much about it at the time, but it wasn't fully in my own awareness.
Or more likely they were leading and showing me -
'Yes! well done Nicola, You have finally understood us!
I now know this to be me in this painting, but 'I' just appeared, 'I' was never consciously put there.
This painting was one of many that served to educate me about enlightenment. A journey where spirit give me what I am ready to learn and understand. I then instigate the conversation for others so that they can remember what they know deep inside.
The work is tremendously healing. All art is. The silence and working so closely in each others energy. Also, meditation causes a person to enter no mind. They are in their superconscious. The super conscious is like the branches of a tree, and links each of us to universal consciousness - hence the profound channeling.
With such depth of no mind however, there is alway a proportion of work that is saved for ourselves - for our own healing. A little bit of stored pain in the depths of our soul is always bought up for further review to see if we are completely healed from it.
Things will be repeatedly resurface until the story is finished and there is nothing further to learn.
My idea for the collaborations was something that had been steadily evolving for many years......
One of the most privileged things that I have experienced during my eleven years of teaching is to join with children and adults in working on THEIR art. I never started off as a teacher with this as my intention. I found my feet with students asking for what THEY needed from me, or something presenting itself very clearly.One of the very early workshops I did, a lady was very distressed with her work and as she left she crumpled it up and tossed it into the bin. Later that evening I dug it out, smoothed the creases and felt the need to continue with the pastel drawing for several hours until I considered it finished.
The following week I gave it back to her. She was delighted with it and subsequently decided to continue coming to class because her work was worthy. She was worthwhile and she didn't need to be hiding her artistic creations from anyone.
After this I naturally began showing people how to be creative by demonstrating on their own work. It seemed the logical way of doing things. It is impossible to teach art through verbal instruction alone. A student needs to actually see how an artist lays down colour and texture.
I found that it had taken me years of experimentation as a self taught artist, learning my skills, but that I could teach all that I had learned in the blink of an eye, and a young person would absorbed it like a sponge. I found this very exciting.
It took me a long while to realise the fullness of creating with someone on their work.
I now know that I am a spiritual teacher / Lightworker / Starseed. It took me a fair while to realise that this is how it is categorised in our language. I just function as I do - with spirit as my guide.
It is extremely powerful when you are opening a space for a student to work safely with their crown chakra wide open and then the two of you link - as if you are linking energy pathways to spirit.
The action of myself painting in this way causes an immediate 'source energy' feeling of peace to enter the room. Students love it. Many do not understand why it is so restful, hypnotic, relaxing, blissful, comforting. It is because the energy that they recognise from home - spirit - is in the room. I am in the energy, and it has channelled through me into the room.
By working with a student, it is like them hitching a lift in my car.(carcass, Ka case. Case for my spirit.)
When I do this repetitively with students they get so use to the energy signature that they eventually can do the journey themselves. Even if I am helping someone else with their work, my energy is always leading the group to the point where they need to go.
Eventually a whole group will be able to help each other, and the results will be clearly visible in the ease of creation and clarity of their work.
If a student is suffering emotionally and is stressed, then the others in the group will often struggle to raise up the group vibration as it is like trying to fly a lead ballon.
It has taken a lot of training for me to fly with lead balloons but I now find it relatively easy when I just love painting. There is no trying involved. It is egoless.
The Key Is Love. Passion, and being nowhere else.
This wonderful connection you get when two spirits join lightly is what I wanted others to share. This is why I was so interested in getting people to work together.The egolessness of working with another when the painting is not yours. You don't own it, so you flow with another's line or colour without trying to control it.
I found this to be a very powerful way of channelling as you are not trying to make the painting anything in particular.
People are in a joyous space because they are having a fulfilling shared experience, where all fears of having to create something with exact form, that actually is something of a third dimensional nature - where this is not required. As a result, people go further into a no mind state.
Further into a meditative state.
The energy becomes nicer and nicer and grabs you into its soothingness.
People swap areas, and work over and round one another, and then the most remarkable thing happens.
When we work in the no mind state, we channel, and from our haphazard doodlings come forms and shapes as in the girl in the painting above. She is walking between the worlds - spirit and earth. This painting is by Dayzii, Josh and myself and I was non verbally, non intentionally teaching them about walking between the worlds.... I had been pondering much about it at the time, but it wasn't fully in my own awareness.
Or more likely they were leading and showing me -
'Yes! well done Nicola, You have finally understood us!
I now know this to be me in this painting, but 'I' just appeared, 'I' was never consciously put there.
This painting was one of many that served to educate me about enlightenment. A journey where spirit give me what I am ready to learn and understand. I then instigate the conversation for others so that they can remember what they know deep inside.
The work is tremendously healing. All art is. The silence and working so closely in each others energy. Also, meditation causes a person to enter no mind. They are in their superconscious. The super conscious is like the branches of a tree, and links each of us to universal consciousness - hence the profound channeling.
With such depth of no mind however, there is alway a proportion of work that is saved for ourselves - for our own healing. A little bit of stored pain in the depths of our soul is always bought up for further review to see if we are completely healed from it.
Things will be repeatedly resurface until the story is finished and there is nothing further to learn.
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