About the Presentation:
To Form Is To Transform: Art As An Alchemical Process For Ascending and Descending

This slide presentation will highlight various critical themes around art, therapy, and healing. It will be suggested that the transformative, symbolic significance of visual images, when created out of a truthful personal narrative, supports inner transformation at the deepest of levels. Art and the creative process fosters the development of ego strengths, personal identity, and social engagement when practiced in community. Examples of client art will be shown, highlighting the use of art, for therapy, in both theory and practice.

It will become clear that art is not a luxury, but a necessity when working with emotionally loaded material from a personal, social or cultural perspective. The capacity for art to give form to feeling and affect will be stressed throughout the presentation. Hopefully, those present will take away a greater appreciation for the arts within our communities as a way to contain and transform suffering and pain.

About the Presenter:

Michael Franklin has been practicing and teaching art therapy at various universities since 1981. He is currently the director of the graduate art therapy program at Naropa University in Boulder Colorado. He has lectured nationally and internationally, and is an active artist and writer focusing on the relationship between art therapy, yoga philosophy, and meditation. His research interests have centered on relationships between meditation, yoga philosophy, and art.