Say Yes! to Your Creative Self and Make Creativity Yours Workshop
This workshop uses words and images to explore everyday ways of boosting personal creativity. Participants examine the contents of a pocket-size bag as a way of building awareness, enjoy imagination stretching exercises and look at ways to use color, temperature and sound to enrich their creative environment to best suit creative output.
Participants will use the classic American Indian Circle poem tradition of connecting everyday objects with nature and the Japanese haiku poem of only 17 syllables as simple practices that encourage self-expression. Playing the Squiggle Game as did the artists of the Lyme Art Colony will demonstrate the use of simple doodling images to open the mind and free blocked thoughts.
Participants leave with a greater understanding of the everyday connections and possibilities of creativity, along with fun and simple thoughts and exercise to develop their own creative bones. Please bring a notebook, pencils and pen. Each participant receives a signed copy of “Say Yes! to Your Creative Self.”
“Say Yes! to Your Creative Self” is an invitation to creativity. Written by Old Say brook author, poet, painter and lover of nature, Mary O’Connor, this full-color, self-help book is filled with tips and prompts, photos and inspirational writings on ways to boost our ways of being creatively stimulated. Intrigued by the magic of the commonplace, Mary seeks to capture its delight through her paintings and writing. Her joy-centered books include Passing Shadows–Images and Words of Inspiration; Life Is Full of Sweet Spots, as well as Dreams of a Wingless Child, a collection of award-winning nature and inspirational verses. She often complements her work with photographic images as well as paintings in watercolor and acrylics. Her paintings have been exhibited by area art associations, and her people and pet portraits are treasured by individual owners. A former instructor of poetry at the York Correctional Institution, Niantic, she currently serves as a docent at the Florence Griswold Museum, Old Lyme. O’Connor’s work is currently exhibited at Spectrum Gallery in Centerbrook, Connecticut.