Colour Education Programs
Catherine van Wilgenburg presents a number of nationally accredited Colour Education programs with a focus on the experience of colour in visual art, design, architecture and health for practitioners to work effectively with colour.
For more infomation about any of these programs, please contact Catherine.
Colour and Artistic Communication
ART 1101, Diploma & Advanced Diploma of Holistic Counselling (accredited by Nationally Recognised Training and the Training Accreditation Council of Western Australia)
Organisation: Sophia College of Counselling
This program develops the ability to use colour in counselling therapies, and to create an awareness of colour vocabulary in the external world of minerals, vegetation and the elements with the inner world of feeling and emotion, leading to insight about colour experienced in the therapeutic processes of releasing, expressing and healing.
Catherine has presented the Colour and Artistic Communication Unit (ART 1101) at the Sophia College Diploma in Holistic Counselling in Western Australia, Brisbane and Singapore. The course develops a vocabulary of colour in the external world of natural vegetation as well as with our world of feeling. Through gesture and sensing, colours are identified and practised for self-nurturing, strengthening, boundary maintenance and other resourcing issues which present during counselling. Working with an inner personal issue over a period of one month using watercolour paints a creative painting project is undertaken to demonstrate the processing of one's own experience.
"These images are excerpts from a month of paintings carried out after my mother’s death. I painted every day to get a glimpse of what was happening in me during my grieving.
"This led me to develop this method of painting in watercolour as a counselling tool which now forms the basis of the Colour and Artistic Communication ART 1101 Unit in the Graduate Diploma of Counselling at Sophia College of Counselling."
~ Catherine van Wilgenburg
Individual and group work facilitates the use of colour tool for sensing colour experience
Bad posture or searching for gold? Students work with prisms to develop colour perception
Patterns emerge in individual style, motifs, gestures, saturation to be sensed by self and others
The enlarged watercolour image laid out in fabrics allows greater awareness of current life issues
Course work
Structured exercises connect bodily experience of colour with the manual use of water colour paints, fabrics and coloured lights. Self exploration throughout this weekend culminates in the ongoing creation of a painting journal for one month after the intensive weekend. Students, in conjunction with the Counselling Dynamics Unit can then practice these methods with clients during their Praxis Unit.
The experience of colour
Exercises in sensing physical responses to colour, in memory and meditation are recorded in water colour paint on 300gsm paper. Students then respond to their own and others’ work through developing a contextual knowledge of gesture, gravity and levity, orientation, warming and cooling, in the marks and fields of colour.
The language and vocabulary of colour
Sitting through the spectrum of coloured light in the Photosensitivity Test and practice with prisms gives students an experience of how colour is created through the intermingling of light and darkness, and a glimpse of the two spectra of light and darkness and the complementarity of Newtonian and Goethean Colour theories.
Communicating with colour in watercolour paint
300 gsm watercolour paper permits practice of watercolour painting without destruction of the paper, when experimenting with cottonbuds and toilet paper, blowing, and wet on wet methods. Watercolour painting can be sympathetic to the subtle impressions of the astral and etheric bodies and allows deep seated memories to emerge for processing during these sessions. A trained counsellor is always present during these sessions should students require one to one counselling at any time during the intensive session.
Communicating with colour fabrics, prisms and coloured light
This multidimensional approach to immersion in colour includes experiencing colour from its physical to psycho-spiritual existence, thereby integrating the body, mind and spiritual experiences of colour. Working with the finer frequency of coloured light, with the transparency of watercolour suspended in gum Arabic, with silk and ban silk fabrics, students become attuned to the sensitivities of their subtle bodies. Students lay out their watercolour painting in fabrics, enlarging scale and composition to recreate a desirable future relationship or a career or lifestyle.
Painting at bottom centre is translated into a fabric layout, intensifying and clarifying the meaning of the image
A selection of comments from students:
"Catherine was so inspirational. Her energy bounded through the room. An amazing woman."
"Catherine was so knowledgeable and had so much wisdom to share with all. Her positive outlook was very motivational."
"Excellent teacher. Could grasp everything she spoke about with understanding."
For more information, please visit the Sophia College website.
Organisation: Faculty of Human Development, Dept. of Nursing, Victoria University
Location: St Albans Campus, Victoria University, Melbourne
Visual Perception and the Theoretical Foundations of Healing, Unit 1HHG 5125 in the Graduate Diploma of Complementary Therapies. Visual perception and healing was considered in the context of the role of sensory perception in healing. Visual perception depends upon the development of the sense of sight through the interaction of three aspects of vision:
- The formation of the sensation, elementary sight through the light pathway from the retina to the visual cortex
- Seeing meaning as an outcome from activity from the visual cortex to the cerebral cortex
- Feeling and smelling as an outcome from activity from the visual cortex to the limbic system
Lecture Seminar: Research Fires the Creative Furnace
Organisation: Department of the Built Environment, Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane
"The creative industries play a pivotal role in innovation as a hot house for growing innovative people – people with creative minds and creative imaginations... Richard Florida's recent book The Rise of the Creative Class reminded us that, in the new people era of a knowledge economy, one of our key challenges is 'how to keep stoking and tapping the creative furnace inside each human being.'"
~ Dr Terry Cutler in his opening speech of the QUT Creative Industries Precinct Launch, Kelvin Grove, Brisbane, May 2004
Catherine van Wilgenburg, director of Living Colour Studio, proposes that research is the 'tapping into that creative furnace inside each human being'.
She suggests that by claiming every creative project in one's practice as research, the imagination is moulded into forms which are continually reconfigured around the creator's innate passion. It is this passion which fires the furnace.
Research methods vary across the art/science divide but in identifying different methods of enquiry researchers will locate the appropriate methods for their chosen area of research within their creative practice.
This makes enquiry into one's passion both reasonable and demonstrable!
Organisation: National Council of Social Service Institute, Singapore
Location: Singapore
Fun and Games with Colour for Children Participants were drawn from a number of career streams including personal counsellors, team leaders of children's services, youth workers, social workers with a specific interest in non verbal communication with clients. Participants explored colour as an additional tool for sensing inner content for use by or themselves and their clients.
For more infomation about any of these programs, please contact Catherine.
