When I tell people that I am studying art therapy they often say things like: “so if I showed you one of my drawings you’d be able to tell me what’s wrong with me?” Um… no. That’s not how it works. Everyone approaches artwork from their own experiences with their own perspectives, and therefore often interpret pieces very differently from one another. Sometimes they aren’t even close to what the artist themselves intended. But whatever comes from the artist through their creative expression is an […]
Recognizing Individual Differences in Experience
In preparation for an upcoming course on issues of professional practice in art therapy, I read this book on postmodernism and art therapy, as edited by Helene Burt. The book itself is comprised of a number of different author’s contributions, who are practicing or researching art therapists themselves. The focus of the chapters vary, based on the practitioner’s area of personal research or practice. They include areas such as: language differences between clients and therapists, working with a diversity of culture in certain areas, feminist […]
A Childhood Throwback
Oh Amelia Bedelia. She can either be seen as the most terrifying character ever due to the way she takes things so literally, or as a reminder that not everyone understands things in the same way, and sometimes we need to adjust or learn to communicate in new ways in order to facilitate different ways of thinking/people and how they are. In fact, at the end of the first Amelia Bedelia book, her employer Mr. Rogers makes a point of saying he will learn to […]
Louis Kept Changing the Title to “Who We Aren’t” on Copies at that One Book Signing. Which is Interesting.
Of course there will always be differences between the publicly presented images of a person and who they really are, especially if the person in question is a public figure, celebrity, etc. So while it truly feels like the boys of One Direction want to be genuine about who they are as people, what they want to say, and how they want to grow and progress in their music, there is still something so controlled about how they are managed and how One Direction™ is […]
“Better the Devil you Know” My Friend Said as a Useless Mayor was Re-elected
I told myself I would not end this year’s Cannonball read with a review of a textbook. And so, here is the second volume of Hellblazer, which I finally managed to find over a year after I read the first volume. Though I normally can pick up a series and remember most parts of what had happened previously once I get back into it, I had trouble this time, to be honest, and needed a refresher to really start enjoying the story again. Overall, my […]