{"id":20301,"date":"2018-04-04T20:46:46","date_gmt":"2018-04-05T00:46:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/?p=20301"},"modified":"2018-04-04T20:46:46","modified_gmt":"2018-04-05T00:46:46","slug":"art-with-heart-brings-out-the-colours-of-life","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/art-with-heart-brings-out-the-colours-of-life\/","title":{"rendered":"Art with Heart brings out the colours of life"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Brock Weir <\/strong><\/p>\n

During her recovery on the road to mental wellness, Liza Cadawas found she was having a hard time expressing herself.
\nShe felt \u201cstalled\u201d and at a crossroads, but once she found some paints and a few pencil crayons in hand, she felt a new world opening up to her and that roadblock to self-expression slowly lifting away.
\nThe results of this journey \u2013 and the work of many other members of the Canadian Mental Health Association\u2019s Art Therapy program \u2013 can now be found on the wall of the Aurora Public Library\u2019s Colleen Abbot Gallery in the exhibition \u201cArt with Heart.\u201d
\nThe Aurora-based Canadian Mental Health Association\u2019s \u201cArt with Heart\u201d group captures the power of paint, pastels and various other media in the work they do to aid recovery \u2013 and it is all captured in the vivid and expressive show.
\n\u201cI found in the group I didn\u2019t really have to say much,\u201d recalls Liza. \u201cI was given some paint, some pencil crayons and very simple directives and I could put myself right into the art itself. I am not an artist, I had never done this before, but when I started two years ago I thought it was so much easier for me to draw \u2013 even abstract \u2013 to express myself, express the feeling I was having, the thoughts that were hard for me to speak into the work. That is what drew me to the group and what made me stay with the group.\u201d
\nOnce she began expressing herself artistically, Liza says she felt \u201cvery clear.\u201d She didn\u2019t feel constrained in any way and, at the same time, she felt very encouraged by the group as a whole.
\n\u201cI surprised myself every week,\u201d says Liza of what she created. \u201cFrom my perspective, it is surprising that I feel more like an artist than when I first started. I think that has been the feedback from everyone else, that I might have some kind of artistic creativity I didn\u2019t know was there.
\n\u201cSelf-esteem is always an issue for me and I think that my own personal self-esteem has definitely increased and has been built up through this regular group alone, really and truly because of the encouragement in the group, the ability to just freely express and not be worried about what anyone is going to say about it.\u201d
\nWithin the program, there are opportunities for members of the group to share their work and provide feedback on what the others have created. You are able to do so as you feel comfortable, but it is never something that is forced. Liza says participants have the ability to share how a particular instructor\u2019s directive was interpreted on the canvas or paper and see how others are interpreting the same.
\n\u201cYou have the ability to share how you interpreted it, and there\u2019s feedback on what everyone else might see, how my particular process has changed, or something that looks completely different from what I intended,\u201d she says.
\nLiza is showing two pieces in the Library show. The first is one created around the idea of how she sees herself as a person, with the words \u201cI Am\u201d very much front and centre. It an illustration of how she has started to develop a better sense of who she is \u2013 \u201cI am a little bit more powerful than I thought I was, I am more expressive than I thought I was\u201d \u2013 and a second piece, also exploring the issue of self-esteem, inspired by the work of Vincent Van Gogh.
\nVan Gogh, she says, wanted to prove his art was worth something to the world and, through Liza\u2019s own work, she is proving her worth to herself.
\n\u201cI just want people to have a feeling,\u201d she says of how she would like her own art interpreted. \u201cIt doesn\u2019t have to be someone who struggles with mental wellness, it can be anybody who needs any type of healing. It is important to show just how healing it can be and how important it is for our recovery and our journey to recovery. It has helped and it helps us express ourselves again in ways that are sometimes hard to speak.
\n\u201cIf someone is looking for a form of therapy that might be a bit different for them, give it a try. You don\u2019t have to be an artist, obviously, and you don\u2019t have to know anything about form, line, or any of those artistic things. It can be a safe space for someone. The environment is just so supportive and I think that\u2019s what helps us so much.\u201d
\nThe \u201cArt with Heart\u201d exhibition is now on at the Aurora Public Library through April 15. For more information on the Canadian Mental Health Association and the services it provides in the community, including art therapy, visit www.cmha.ca.<\/p>\n\"Facebook\"<\/a>\"twitter\"<\/a>\"mail\"<\/a>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

During her recovery on the road to mental wellness, Liza Cadawas found she was having a hard time expressing herself.
\nShe felt \u201cstalled\u201d and at a crossroads, but once she found some paints and a few pencil crayons in hand, she felt a new world opening up to her and that roadblock to self-expression slowly lifting away. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":20269,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[4,5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-20301","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-general_news","category-news"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/04\/2018-04-05-04.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3D2k4-5hr","publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-04-18 04:45:28","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20301","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=20301"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20301\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/20269"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=20301"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=20301"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=20301"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}