Art for Art's Sake vs. Art For Your Sake
The therapeutic mission of Art For Your Sake is just that: art for your sake. The service I provide is a positive visualization in the form of a custom, fine art prescriptive photomontage. I call them "Healing Dreamscapes." This positive visualization is generally called for in the wake of loss and bereavement, a relationship rift or as a positive reminder of the work done in therapy. Clients come to me on their own, or through therapists, caregivers or clergy.
Process
I interview the client about a past trauma (for example, a death in the family). I then collect these anecdotes as well as personal photos (ones that particularly resonate) and repurpose them, combining them with whimsical elements (new backdrops and meaningful objects) to transform them in a positive way. I use photo manipulation software to digitally alter the photographs.
The essential idea behind Healing Dreamscapes is that when we send the mind to "retrieve" emotional memories (through the actions of vivid imagery and narrative elements), the mind goes into a temporary state of lability. During this period of lability, the new memories created in the Dreamscape can be re-encoded into the brain in a transformed state. What makes the Healing Dreamscape interesting and powerful is its potential for the prescriptive photomontage to positively influence their actual memories.
If we are to believe that the soul is the sum total of our memories, then it's not difficult to understand how painful experiences can unhinge the architecture of our memories. These experiences can be both a "Big T" trauma, or a slight heard decades earlier. However, by externalizing and re-envisioning the fragments of an individual's memory (photos and anecdotes), the prescriptive photomontage can fulfill the wished for reality sorely missed by that individual. In its final state, this synthesized reality can be internalized again for healing.
How different is my healing work from my purely celebrative work? Fundamentally, I am still collecting the back story on your photographs and digitally manipulating photographs (yours or mine) much as I do on the celebration side - combining them so that there is still a naturalness of scale, lighting, shadow, color saturation and so forth. Just like on the celebration side, these digital files are outputted either as an archival photographic print; or transferred to fabric (photo purses), cardstock (gratitude cards), plastic and wood (photo sculptures) by companies that specialize in photo gifts.
The major difference is that I am no longer just tackling compositional issues, but also emotional issues that have colored someone's perception of the past, present and future. By re-envisioning their life as their Private Mythologist - as if it were an epic poem, complete with aspirational scenery and props that fit their life and no one else's - I am providing my clients with a bounty of happier and healthier endings.
Viewing the Healing Dreamscape works much in the same way as replaying a healing dream. It lavishes attention and time on a subject, slowing down time (especially valuable when bereavement, as you know, can't be rushed along). It physically separates and commingles images into new hierarchies that safely remove negative associations you might have with a particular photograph, returning control to the individual. Lastly, by infusing the piece with humor (say, in the form of a symbolic object), the underlying issues (from abandonment to regret) often become diffused by the theatrical juxtapositions between people, objects and landscape.
Interacting with their Healing Dreamscape on a regular basis has helped many of my clients to, in the words of Judy Weiser of the Photo Therapy Centre, "fully recognize their potential for deeper therapeutic effects beyond the initial visual impact."
Most of us do not remember our life stories in a linear fashion, that is, with a beginning and an end. It's not always how the past makes sense to us. Perhaps that's why Healing Dreamscapes are so powerful. It is a wishful reality to order, a moment in time that you can bask in and interpret for perpetuity.
In short, Happy beats Sad. By reconstructing a wishful reality that coexists with the bad to come I'm showing how beautiful and fragile life is. And how beautiful it is when tears of sadness turn to tears of joy.
Art for Art's Sake vs. Art For Your Sake
Technique
From your personal photos, I create a prescriptive photomontage for one person; one couple; or one family. Yet Healing Dreamscapes are not simply photos stitched together by a special effects software program. Nor are they art effects. Each dreamscape is art for your sake and yours alone. It's a thoughtful environment conjured up to look like nothing you've ever dreamed of; a place where you didn't even know you longed to be.
Now, if that doesn't excite you, this will.
From a technical rather than commercial standpoint, only an artist for your sake:
- critically selects your photographs on the basis of quality, not quantity
- extracts and re-juxtaposes elements for both aesthetic and conceptual reasons
- gives special consideration to hierarchies of lighting, scale and skin tone
- searches for fresh images for geographical/historical accuracy, and
- injects meaningfulness, humor and a goal into the artistic composition, and finally
- helps you decide whether it is appropriate for you to take your healing artwork to the next level, by configuring it as a super-sized tribute; as a photo gift or as a sympathy card.
Engaging an artist who has worked countless times with trained therapists, spiritual and pastoral counselors may be a brand new experience for you. But regardless of your project - healing artwork, memorial portrait -fine art standards and the therapeutic goal are always upheld with equal respect.
Special Tip: If you decide to give my healing artwork to someone by a specific date -- but you're afraid you'll forget to send me photos in time, send yourself a RemindMe email. It's wonderful and absolutely free and easy to set up. Not sure you really need it? Just press the cancel key.
Even prior to making your photomontage, my work includes everything that restores your photos to its original glory. Your images are scrubbed and groomed of any visual noise (dents, discoloration, scanner lint, etc.). This includes:
§ Photo retouching (color and complexion correction)
§ Photo restoration (repair of severe cracking and obliterated features)
§ Photo augmentation (recreating missing parts)
§ Digital manipulation (flipping orientation, changing scale, adding shadows, motion and lighting effects)
Such care in digital photo manipulation is especially important when a tiny photo may be scanned at a high resolution and then enlarged to super-size prints. From a water-damaged photo blown halfway down the street by Katrina to a seriously bent photo of newlyweds from the 1920s, my goal is always to repair a photo to its original condition - or else we choose another photograph.
Specialties
missing parts, missing objects
Sometimes body parts are missing (like the little boy in Peter C's dreamscape, who originally sits in waist deep grass, but then needs legs to kneel on the photomontage). No problem. Missing knees, sneakers, tips of fingers - anything that's been rudely lopped off by the photographer - is happily reconstructed one of two ways. Either I grab the missing part from another photo of the same individual, or I work like a portrait painter, inferring color or texture from similar photos so that I can "clone" the missing part onto the spot in need.
Other times there are missing objects (like the Japanese Obon lanterns in Kane N's tribute of gratitude) that are imperative for lending a feeling of authenticity to the dreamscape. To find these cultural, historical or geographical objects, I do an extensive photo search worldwide, and ask amateur and professional photographers for permission to use their photos for a one-time use.
fuzzy, damaged or overexposed photos
Sometimes the blurriest photo is someone's favorite photo.
Take the dreamscape portrait of Samantha L, whose mom and dad dearly loved an overexposed, out-of-focus shot of their prima ballerina on her belly, daydreaming in ballet class. The problem was that the picture was clearly out of focus. I needed some illusionary device that made Samantha appear to be as sharp as the other surrounding objects I added into her photomontage. When I came across a tondo of cherubim, I knew I hit the jackpot. This classical porthole is meant to reside high in the sky, and so it places Samantha at the farthest distance from the viewer. In short, it cleverly turned Samantha into a dreamy angel!