Week note #2 Art Therapy

 While humans have been communicating via art since the first cave paintings, for the 20th century, (life-span 1890 to 1983) the American Margaret Naumburg, could very possibly be the mother of art therapy.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margaret_Naumburg Quote from Wikipedia.

Margaret Naumburg's dynamically oriented art therapy, approach promotes " the release of spontaneous imagery" from the client through the symbols drawn and free association of the artworks, sometimes with eye closed drawing on a large sheet of paper. The patient to move their chosen material, paint or chalk pastel, around the page until satisfied but asked that the material not be lifted from the page from start to finish. After the drawing is created the drawer is then allowed to look at the artwork and try to create another form from the scribble. The client is encouraged to move the page around until an image is found. Once an image is seen in the scribble drawing, or painting, they are asked to color it in. At this point if the client wants to talk about the artwork while creating, they are encouraged to do so.

The therapist withholds interpretation encouraging clients to discover what their picture means to them. It was important to Naumburg to avoid interpreting or commenting on the client's artwork so the client would not change their mind about what was created and to avoid being wrong. Naumburg used art as the means for clients to visually project their conflicts, and when it was too difficult for the client to relax, she would provide them with art lessons or specific directive projects instead. 

Other than think about art therapy instead of doing art, I've been researching and reading quite a bit, as learning-stuff definitely is a happy-place for me. 

Speaking of reading, I've often talked with artist friends about our personal mark and form language and I'm reading this. Early Rock Art of the American West by Ekkehart Malotiki and Ellen Dissanayake

https://books.google.com/books/about/Early_Rock_Art_of_the_American_West.html?id=Ui5fDwAAQBAJ

A quote from page 8, (yes I'm also reading the introduction pages).

World-wide, abstract-geometric marks are remarkable for being persistent (enduring in time and recurring over time and space), consistent (having similar style and content wherever on Earth they are found), and resistant (to change over time and to change in the individuals or culture that created them). 

But, I'm not feeling like sharing much else from last week, but 😌.... I did make this graphic. It was in response to another graphic I didn't like. I was like, I don't like that graphic, so make one that I do agree with/like and here is it. 

Maybe, random what I learned this week...?

Processing social media over years, two decades in 2025. More if you count the film forum I was involved with in 1999. I've come to the conclusion that processing the negative (anger, hate and fear) is changing my daily ruminations to such an extent that I need to have a self-defense plan for my mental health. 

On Mastodon in December last year 2022, someone um... Andrew Doran suggested learning in public.

 https://indieweb.social/@Uva_Be/110198936104504047 and https://www.swyx.io/learn-in-public

At the time, another person, Steve Martin (not that Steve Martin) had caught my attention because he was doing a hashtag game on Twitter, #365ThingsILike regardless of if he invented the game. The idea is to pause and ponder something you like, instead of responding to the negative i.e. the (anger, hate and fear) 365. 

Personally, I found this challenge to be much more difficult than I expected, and at about 322 I stopped posting my list because I'm a natural introvert/recluse and it felt like exhibitionist behavior. 

Soooo.... ? (soooo as a question with too many 'o's is one of my favorite words). 

With art, my favorite form of communication, seconded by writing, mostly free prose like this and terrible almost Vogon level poetry, and years of attempts at long fiction. Soooooo? I have been doing an art derivate paper meditation since July 2012. 

And just a few minutes ago, April 14, 2023 I was thinking about posting a note I wrote to myself. 

Human hearing: there's too much about the bad, hearing loss to hyperacusis yikes! And nowhere near enough about good hearing. 

Good hearing. Musically, it's called perfect pitch, and there's levels of trained ears, golden ears, silver ears, etc... regardless of the natural non-metallic resonance to my ears or how good or not my sense of pitch is. Because of cancer in my 20s, not because of hearing loss, my hearing was tested. I have acute hearing. This turns out, once again to be a mental thing and the extreme sensitivity to noise is more commonly associated with folks in the Asperger's/Autism spectrum than in the general public. 

Back to the first two words in the above paragraph. Good hearing. A lot of the work of hearing, as with sight, is done in the mind. And good news! There are four areas of good hearing: 

1. Word clarity and comprehension of the strings of sounds and pauses that make up speech. 
2. Amplitude or volume: ability to hear soft or quiet sounds, or comprehend what is a loud noise. Seems counter intuitive please see Hyperacusis. Amplitude also requires the ability to hear many sounds, in an overlapping mix of waves or sound depth and textures.
3. Pitch: ability to hear high pitches or low sounds.
4. And hearing range: the human version of echo location or understanding of relative distance or closeness of heard sounds, to be able to triangulate the source of a sound, or understand a noise's origin as the sound waves rush past or reach you from a distance.

And this little, what I learned this week was brought to you by the hashtag game #OneWordWednesday 4/12/2023 theme sound. 

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Last week: April 6, 2023, again attempting to neutralize the negative (anger, hate and fear) a doctor I banter with sometimes for fun on Twitter Allen Y. Tien MD MHS  

https://twitter.com/Uva_Be/status/1644053848322117633 was tweeting about deep learning, and I wanted to know why it's such a challenge to find data about the good chemical's as the cortisol stress hormone and fight or flight is "everywhere" in search results, I'd heard a podcast I now can't find, via Lex Fridman (yes I went to his official site and did a search on many of the people who I thought it might be, with no joy). While I still haven't found this Professor of Joy at seeing nature expressed in the body, not just a conversation on obvious aesthetics but the positive chemical correlation in the body. No, not melatonin. That is apparently stress's chemical opposite. BIG #sigh. Anyway, Allen suggested Deep Beauty Brain Systems as search words. And this led me to #neuroesthetics  to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuroesthetics 

And I found an author. Ellen Dissanayake with multiple books on the topic and one of the four books was in the library. 

There's my random what I learned from the past two weeks. I'll post more as I find something interesting and find I have a block of time. 

+  Uva Be