Creative Collaboration

A message from trainer, coach, massage therapist and Hendricks friend, Sherri Odelson:

Creativity

Story of Transformation

I’d like to share something that I’ve been doing for about eight months now and it culminated today with an art exhibit in Jerusalem with about 15 other groups of artisans and the volunteers that they worked with.

My particular group has been two young ladies of 16 years old and they come and meet with me once a week . We were put together as a group because I am an artist and they also love to do art. In that space of openness and communication we have been practising different forms of artwork; acrylics and watercolours and drumming and singing and baking and lots of conversation. I have also had the pleasure of sharing with them fear melters, and some breath work.

This large project that we just finished was taking letters from the Hebrew alphabet, and we chose the letters that spell out the word love in Hebrew . There is also numerology with the Hebrew letters and we needed to tell a story about what those letters meant to us using anything that we wanted… so some of it was related to our personal names. Some of it was related for me. It was from my daughter’s name. Some of it was historical family and biblical names. Some of it was just any stories that came up and all of them were fascinating.

In addition to the letters, we also did a community tree. This tree had three panels and it ranged from early morning to dusk with the trunk of the tree being on the middle canvas, which I did quite a bit of and the other two canvases being done by the young women.

The process that I use for my painting is intentional creativity.  In doing so we put our intention onto the canvas before we start painting and we do a blessing on the canvas and then we make marks on the canvas of things that are going on in our life that are important And there’s many different layers to it and I will attach the pictures so that you can see what they look like.

We also started with intention on the letters and again the letters had a story behind them.

The leaves on the tree we had over 250 magnetised leaves that people were able to take and write down their hopes, dreams,wishes, wants, memorials, whatever it was in their hearts, and put it back up on the tree. We had many different languages on the tree and I truly believe that it brought hope to the people that were there.

I know that I use the tools that I have learned through the Hendricks community for the past almost 30 years . Thank you for giving me the tools that enable me to help others.

Here is a link to the organization that put it all together: https://tarbutmovement.org/