The Friday Creative Sanctuary

An Open Studio for Expressive Arts

I’ve been teaching “the Friday class” in Lake Worth since 2012! Over the years, I’ve come to think of it as a Sanctuary for Expressive Arts—a creative space found by the people who need it. Some come for a season; others return for years and years.

This fall, the Friday class centers on paper-based expressive arts: intuitive painting, art journaling, Gelli plate printing, collage and SoulCollage®.

Each session will begin with a brief meditative, art-journal-based invitation: a technique, tool, material, image or question to open the door into creative practice. These playful beginnings are meant to expand your mixed-media repertoire and offer fresh ways into the work—not to dictate what you make.

From there, you may continue exploring the opening process or shift into your own work. Paint, tear, paste, print, layer, follow an image—or simply begin without knowing where you are going.

Creative work does not always remain flat! For experienced students, a painting or journal process may sometimes ask to become dimensional, perhaps growing into an assemblage or shrine. There is room to follow that organic movement when it happens. Mosaic work, however, has its own dedicated studio time on Wednesdays.

An example of an opening prompt that often includes making our own collage fodder for art journaling.

Perhaps you have paintings, projects or art journals at home waiting for new life. Perhaps you are itching to paint large and loud on big paper. Perhaps you want to try something different every week. Or perhaps you simply know that you need to be in the studio with others long enough for your Soul to tell you what it needs.

There is room here for playful experimentation and gloriously messy discovery—and for the deeper layers of yourself that can become more audible in the attentive atmosphere of the studio.

Wherever you are, you are welcome.

Stop Scrolling and Start Creating!

Do you have saved YouTube videos or reels featuring processes, materials or techniques you’ve been longing to try? Send them my way! Throughout the season, I’ll choose a few of these intriguing discoveries and bring them off the screen and into our Friday play.

It is one thing to watch someone else make art. How would it feel to actually try it?

Materials Are Included

Bring an unfinished art journal if you have one waiting for new life—or choose a journal from the studio if you need one.

I’ll also have books ready to be altered and some of my favorite thin-page journals. Their delicate pages invite you to glue pages together and layer in handmade, painted and found papers, creating a rich variety of surfaces before the journaling even begins.

There is something wonderful about opening to a page that is no longer blank—a page you have already changed, with its own textures, traces and unexpected starting places. The journal itself becomes part of the discovery.

All art materials are included.

A Season for Your Creative Life

Each session will close with a circle of sharing, witnessing and grounding before we head back into the world.

You are not simply buying eight isolated classes. You are reserving your place in a season-long creative container—a dependable Friday sanctuary where your work can gather momentum, your imagination can deepen and your creative thread does not have to be continually dropped and rediscovered.

Because life interrupts, if you miss one of your eight Friday sessions, you may attend one of the designated Sunday Open Studios as your make-up at no additional cost.

What does your Soul need?

What doors might open through creative practice and play?