In 1995 I attended a seminar in Art Therapy at Concordia University: after having completed my Masters’ degree in Painting just recently, I felt that I needed to pursue the notion of art as self therapy and potentially communal therapy. At the time I was interested in deepening my personal insights into the therapeutic elements of a personal Fine Art practice, an insight which I had acquired for myself during my studies and now wanted to share with others. My professor suggested for me, in order to obtain some practical art therapeutic experience, to volunteer my services to art therapists in clinical settings. My phone calls were in vain, however, and I was thrilled when a chance reference to a women’s shelter resulted in a successful interview: the Auberge Transition did not yet have Fine Art workshops, neither for the resident women nor their children. I was given carte blanche as their painting instructor and committed myself for an initial period of 12 months, 4 hours weekly. Over time, what had started out as my teaching a group of women and their children - a group that greatly varied in its make-up each week - turned into my being asked to teach a series of specialized Awareness through Art workshops to women in “follow-up care” in 1996 - workshops which I had based on and developed from my own art practice and had been teaching as a private instructor to groups of women in my own studio. In 1997 I returned to the shelter as a summer volunteer “painting lady” and subsequently taught another round of Awareness through Art workshops in 1998.1999 has brought me the opportunity to once again work with ex-shelter residents in a series of advanced painting workshops, which I co-taught with Cynthia Hammond, and which resulted in the exhibition flight. In September I will return to teach workshops to women who presently receive follow-up care through Auberge Transition. I want to thank the women I taught over the years, for their trust in my teaching methods and the enthusiasm they brought to my classes and workshops: I may have taught them how to paint, but they, in turn, have taught me how to teach. I am now teaching art history at Concordia in the Fall: The Art Object and the Viewer is a seminar in which students join art historical concerns with a theoretical and practical Fine Art practice. Additional past teaching experiences include courses I taught as a Painting and Drawing instructor at the Westmount Visual Arts’ Center (1997 and 1998), as well as an Awareness through Art workshop series I taught to women in Hamburg, Germany during my 1998 stay as an artist in residence with the GEDOK (German and Austrian organization for women artists’).

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