Dr. John Diamond and Healing through Art
By Rich Monetti
On Sunday, May 17th at the Ironwood Gallery in Ridgefield, Connecticut, Dr. John Diamond offered an Art and Healing Seminar in which he discussed and demonstrated a connection between the two topics that seems to have been lost to our modern societies.
"Creative acts should be made in order to heal," says the South Salem medical doctor who now refers to himself as a healer. In following, he drew distinction between painter and artist, writer and author.
"A writer writes because it's deep within him. An author gives
In his particular case, and the effortless strokes that come from what he calls "an active state of meditation," the healing appears on canvas in a form almost resembling the characters of both the Chinese and Japanese alphabet. Whether coming from his conscious or unconscious, it's not quite a coincidence that he is now mirroring the early Zen artists who long ago also hooked into this idea of art as a healing modality.
Not constricting themselves to the types of artistic prerequisites of a Rembrandt or Beethoven, the Buddhist monks augmented their life energy as they painlessly created. As for the viewer, then or now, says Dr. Diamond, these Haiku type paintings cause a dance of the eye, which is a deep message from me to the viewer so that inner peace becomes a bit closer.
It works far away too but bringing it home here did not diminish a global reach on this current aspect of study or the 50 years of clinical application that also spans the globe. Giving this audience a go, the Australian born doctor showed the limits of the soul when the artist is not in touch with it.
Passing out pencils and clipboards, the audience of about 15 showed pretty clear lines of demarcation when the penning was proceeded by a meditative hymn of "a-e-i-o-u." Fear, lack of direction and restraint seemed to give way on paper to freedom, confidence and purpose. "You could never replicate that - it comes and it's gone," he said.
But all art in it's healing form should aspire to connect with the lullabies that are mothers mused to us in infancy. "It's a long way from the cradle to Carnegie Hall," he says of the misdirected path that creativity often takes.
Redirected, patient or sufferers, as he prefers to call them, can finally become aware that they have a soul - thus freeing their subconscious and breaking the bonds that hold us back. "We all have the illness of living," he says, and someday deep into the future he visualizes the day when this approach will offer the ultimate cure.
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