What are Art4Healing® Classes and How Can They Help Me and My Family?

“Art has a powerful way of healing. People can say things with colors that they often have no words for. The power of our program is in the unique way people tell their story with paint on canvas.”

– Laurie Zagon, Founder of Art & Creativity For Healing and creator of the Art4Healing® Method.

I have found this wonderful method that is different from my own personal art and creative work that has helped me therapeutically in working out some of life’s adversities. It has helped me so much over the years, that of course I would want to teach this to others!

The Art4Healing® Method

In 2013 I was trained by Laurie Zagon, the creator of the Art4Healing® Method, from Art & Creativity For Healing, to become a certified Art4Healing® Facilitator. I offer various Art4Healing® classes on this website for individuals and families who are dealing with pain, grief, fear, or stress.

The Mission of Art4Healing®

As a certified Art4Healing® Facilitator, my mission is the same as Art & Creativity for Healing’s mission:

“Our mission is to support emotional healing through art & creative expression for those living in pain, grief, fear, or stress. We give pain a voice and meaning by providing expressive abstract art workshops to support emotional healing. We’re different from other art programs. Our Art4Healing® curriculum contains strictly guided exercises rather than loosely formatted art sessions. These exercises are specially designed to elicit emotional responses. Participants leave encouraged, with enhanced clarity and insight.”

Who Has Art4Healing® Helped?

“Art4Healing® Workshops have helped tens of thousands of men, women, and children give their pain a voice through paint, color, and self-expression. Our Founder, Laurie Zagon, has facilitated Art & Creativity For Healing workshops since 1985. Using her method of Art4Healing®, she has helped thousands of children and adults use paint to process stress, illness, or grief in hospitals, through local and national nonprofit community organizations, and at studio workshops in Orange County. The Zagon method of Art4Healing® was initially developed in New York in 1987 to help busy Wall Street executives conquer stress.”

What are Art4Healing® Classes?

Art4Healing® classes are guided therapeutic abstract painting classes that are used to support emotional healing through art & creative expression for those living with pain, grief, fear, or stress.

Sometimes when we are experiencing a lot of stress in our daily lives, it can be hard to find the words to express our feelings. We may feel overwhelmed by everyone else’s needs or caretaking young children and feel like we can’t take a lot of time to check in with ourselves.

We may also have trauma from our past that we are dealing with. If we are dealing with trauma, this can also make it difficult to express how we feel in words. Therapeutic art like Art4Healing® can really help get some of those stuck feelings out onto paper with paint. Therapy, of course, can be beneficial. But I know that for me, talking about things from my past repeatedly sometimes didn’t create the release of the negative emotions I was seeking, like doing Art4Healing® classes did. Sometimes talking about my stressors or trauma again and again only helped to further deepen the grooves in the well-worn paths in my brain’s limbic system. I am grateful that my brain was trying to protect me but I remained hypervigilant and stuck in fight-or-flight mode even though I had talked something through for years. Art4Healing® classes often help to calm this area of my brain, releases stuck stress and helps me process difficult feelings and emotions. Again, I always recommend seeing a professional licensed therapist or counselor if you’re really struggling with stress and situations that you can’t manage alone. A good therapist is worth their weight in gold. For me personally, I have found Art4Healing® therapeutic art classes to be a beneficial addition to therapy.

Get That Stress Out

By connecting my brain to my hand and the paint, I feel like I am literally “Getting That Stress Out” using different colors onto canvas. It allows me to explore the feelings that come up for me privately and safely as there is no analysis of my painting by anyone! It is abstract, so the meaning is hidden from others unless I tell them. No one has to be artistic or creative to do this, as our goal is not to make pretty and perfect art with this process. You will be using makeup sponges and q-tips to paint, so there is no stress to be a professional artist here. The process actually can work better if you aren’t an artist, so you don’t get hung up on creating a “pretty” piece. Art4Healing® is not about the finished result. It’s about the process of releasing your feelings onto canvas. It’s a very healing process.

Let Your Feelings Out

To let your feelings out onto canvas, you’ll need to get your inner critic out of the way! Play with paint and mess up a canvas for a while! See what you discover about yourself and your feelings. Let go of some of that stress! You deserve to feel better. Then after you’re done with a class, you can spend time reflecting and journaling about what you discovered about yourself if that’s helpful to you. Some people even bring their Art4Healing® pieces to their therapist for further processing and exploration.

Art4Healing® is a Therapeutic Process

This Art4Healing® process has been very therapeutic and helpful to me and has helped tens of thousands of men, women, and children give their pain a voice through paint, color, and self-expression. Art4Healing® can help you and your family too.

You can read more about Art & Creativity for Healing and who they serve here: https://art4healing.org/