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How art therapy could help your COVID-19 blues – CBC.ca

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The sense of isolation during the pandemic was compounded this spring for Tania Santer when she moved more than a thousand kilometres away from her home in Toronto to a small town in northwestern Ontario.

The art therapist says she used her own creativity to cope with her loneliness  — and you can too, even if you don’t think of yourself as a creative type.

“I think a lot of people throughout the pandemic are learning the benefits of being with ourselves, to ask ourselves: ‘how am I feeling?'” and make something from it,” says Santer.

Painting became a vital outlet for Santer as she adjusted to her new life as an art therapist with the Sioux Lookout First Nations Health Authority, far away from friends and family and familiar ground in Toronto.

Art therapist Tania Santer says she turned to her own art practice to help her cope with loneliness after moving from Toronto to Sioux Lookout, Ont. at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. This piece is titled, She Calls to Me. (Submitted by Tania Santer)

“I use my artwork as a way to take a break or escape into a world that I’ve created,” she says. “It becomes a tangible piece of my inner self.

“When I got into that mode of creative art making, I didn’t feel so isolated,” she says. 

For beginners, Santer suggests gathering some old magazines to make a collage. You could select a theme based on colour or the types of images that appeal to you and ask yourself why you’re drawn to them.

The key to allowing art to help you feel better is to silence your inner critic and approach a creative project with a sense of curiosity and possibility, she says.

“There are no rules to art making.”

Artist Tania Santer says art therapy helps create ‘a tangible piece of your inner self’ in the world as in this work that she calls Collapsing into Infinity. (Submitted by Tania Santer)

In its formal practice, art therapy combines psychotherapy and art making to help people express and process difficult emotions.

For example, someone dealing with grief might be asked to use colours or shapes to show what their grief looks like, Santer says, or to consider if grief had a voice what it might say and how it would sound.

“Art is another way to communicate,” Santer says. “It opens up different thought processes. We fall into patterns of speaking so it can be really helpful to have a dialogue with images, especially if you’re feeling stuck.”

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40 Random Bits of Trivia About Artists and the Artsy Art That They Articulate – Cracked.com

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40 Random Bits of Trivia About Artists and the Artsy Art That They Articulate  Cracked.com



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John Little, whose paintings showed the raw side of Montreal, dies at 96 – CBC.ca

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John Little, whose paintings showed the raw side of Montreal, dies at 96  CBC.ca



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A misspelled memorial to the Brontë sisters gets its dots back at last

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LONDON (AP) — With a few daubs of a paintbrush, the Brontë sisters have got their dots back.

More than eight decades after it was installed, a memorial to the three 19th-century sibling novelists in London’s Westminster Abbey was amended Thursday to restore the diaereses – the two dots over the e in their surname.

The dots — which indicate that the name is pronounced “brontay” rather than “bront” — were omitted when the stone tablet commemorating Charlotte, Emily and Anne was erected in the abbey’s Poets’ Corner in October 1939, just after the outbreak of World War II.

They were restored after Brontë historian Sharon Wright, editor of the Brontë Society Gazette, raised the issue with Dean of Westminster David Hoyle. The abbey asked its stonemason to tap in the dots and its conservator to paint them.

“There’s no paper record for anyone complaining about this or mentioning this, so I just wanted to put it right, really,” Wright said. “These three Yorkshire women deserve their place here, but they also deserve to have their name spelled correctly.”

It’s believed the writers’ Irish father Patrick changed the spelling of his surname from Brunty or Prunty when he went to university in England.

Raised on the wild Yorkshire moors, all three sisters died before they were 40, leaving enduring novels including Charlotte’s “Jane Eyre,” Emily’s “Wuthering Heights” and Anne’s “The Tenant of Wildfell Hall.”

Rebecca Yorke, director of the Brontë Society, welcomed the restoration.

“As the Brontës and their work are loved and respected all over the world, it’s entirely appropriate that their name is spelled correctly on their memorial,” she said.

The Canadian Press. All rights reserved.

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