(PHOTOS) Art Center Exhibit Focused on Healing

A large triptych hangs on the wall at the , an arresting and emotional oil painting that is at the same time a symbol of healing. It is titled “Self Portrait as a Breast Cancer Survivor.”

The artist, Sandra Dowd, has a small statement on the piece posted next to the work. 

“I seem to always do self portraits when going through challenges: divorce, childbirth, middle-age spread, aging skin, doctors’ visits and breast cancer. I wasn’t sure how I felt being without breasts; so, I decided to do a self portrait to find out. I’m still not sure, what do you think?”

Dowd’s personal and brave expression of her own healing process is part of a larger exhibit currently on display at Edina Art Center.

In a show open to artists of all ages and levels, the Edina Art Center asked for works that exemplified healing through art. This elicited a variety of responses, in two- and three-dimensional art, some works direct and representational, others abstract, and from both students and veteran artists.  

Though some of the works are intensely personal, a requirement of the show was that all pieces must be for sale. This created an interesting final step in the healing process for each of the artists included: the act of letting go. It was too much to ask for at least one artist, who opted out of the show for that reason, Edina Art Center’s program and gallery coordinator Anne Spooner said.

The show specifically features work by Donna Webb and her students. Webb teaches classes at the , some of which are offered in cooperation with the Edina Art Center. The pieces featured in the gallery show are examples of Hauschka therapeutic watercolor painting, a method of intuitive, color focused painting that attempts to tap into the subconscious and heal through discovery. 

“Being a nonverbal medium, things might come out that people would censor if they were talking,” Webb said.  

The Hauschka method is good for beginners, Webb said, because it focuses on experimentation with color. Some of her students would not have considered themselves artists before and now find their work on the walls of the Edina Art Center. In Hauschka painting, Webb explained, the painter will begin by focusing on color only, even rotating the work so there’s no determined top or bottom, allowing the subconscious to do the work. Think of it as free-writing with paint. Then the painter will stop and look at the work from different angles to see if any images have emerged, like a homemade Rorschach test. The artist may then choose to enhance the image they’ve discovered, allowing the viewer to see it as well.  

Sometimes there’s no image at all, which is just fine, Webb said, as it’s more about the journey anyway. 

“We’re always being asked to balance the checkbook and be on time,” Webb said. “To be in that sort of nothingness of color is a kind of meditation.”

Four of Webb’s own pieces are included in the show, including two Hauschka paintings and one color study in the Collot method, a more rigid therapeutic art method focusing on light and darkness.

The show, titled “Journeys–Healing through Art” runs through September 14.