ABOUT ART FOR AFFECT
Art for Affect delivers instructional content for beginner and intermediate level learners of watercolour.
Art for Affect is a rebranding of what was previously known as Local Art Workshops, which offered pop-up in-person watercolour workshops and events in Ottawa.
Currently, most of the content offered by Art for Affect is virtual, including livestream watercolour workshop events, rentable video workshops, and personal coaching sessions with artist and owner, Andrea Elena.
However some in-person workshops will resume when it is safe to so.
ART IS FOR EVERYONE
Art is something we experience.
We experience it as we create it, as we share it, and as we consume it.
Art affects us.
This is what "art for affect" means, it is about the ways in which art impacts us mentally, spiritually, physically, and emotionally. It is is about our lived experience with and through art.
PHILOSOPHIES
ART AS FLOW SPACE
I thought art was a verb,
not a noun
- Yoko Ono
The process of creating art can be very therapeutic. For many, creating art allows them to enter into a state of flow. Flow is a psychological space where the mind is focused on a creative task, and is able to transcend from the immediate reality, and the confines of time. This state of flow is nourishing to the self, as it allows us to let go of our thoughts and enter an engaged yet meditative realm.
ART AS CONNECTION
If we don’t interact regularly with people face-to-face, the odds are we won’t live as long, remember information as well, or be as happy as we could have been.
-Susan Pinker, The Village Effect
The process of making art can also be an opportunity for creative-commensality. A time in which we can share the experience of art making with others, and benefit from the intrinsic and visceral presence of a sense of community around us. Joining people as we create, and being part of a community, has real value for our well-being.
ART AS THERAPY
Art can put us in touch with concentrated doses of our missing dispositions, and thereby restore a measure of equilibrium to our listing inner selves
- Alain de Botton, Art as Therapy
Making art is also about making meaning for ourselves, both through creating the art and also through beholding it. Benefitting from art is not necessarily exclusive to one of these realms or the other - that is, to either making art or consuming it. Environments that allow both are therefore filled with potential for us to examine our inner selves further, learn, and grow.