.the garden

When I was invited to perform a live painting at a women’s retreat camp with the theme “The Garden” I couldn’t thing of anything else than a painting a blooming heart. The idea of it has so much meanings for me and has been a part of my personal emotional healing process, and being able to share that message with a group of 300 women was a true honor.

I created something special for that experience, instead of having the ladies just watching a live performance and listening to the insight that came from it, I proposed them to get their hands working and be active participants of the art itself.

I placed the two large canvasses flat on tables and invited all of them to pour their thoughts, feelings, pain, worries, anxiety and frustrations into those canvases using words, scribbles and drawings.

I could observe women crying as they strongly scribbled, women writing lists of the things they were worried about, women drawing what would be a picture of themselves with a sad face, women writing about how they were thankful about many things, and by the end of this step of the process we had two beautiful textured canvasses covered with what only art can express.

The closing of this project was even more special, I performed a live painting where I painted the two canvases separately and in different orientations. In the end I moved them close to one another in a right orientation which formed a picture of a heart anatomy with flowers blooming from inside of it.

The closing was with a message about how important it is to externalize what we form many times keep inside of us. About how we can use different tools to allow ourselves to improve and how we can still experience emotional healing even after dealing with hardships.

- Natalia Thomaz