Plant Painting Workshop with Lauren Shantall

Plant painting & healing workshop, facilitated by artist and energy healer @laurenshantall

This workshop will take place during the 'Day out of Time Gathering' at the Grootbos Environmental Centre, near Stanford.

This will start with a short meditation to connect participants to the earth, and to connect them with the plant kingdom.

There will be a short discussion around the energetic anatomy of plants and flowers. This will touch on the role of plants, what kind of beings they are, and their healing capacity.

We will speak about tree and plant “prana” and how to connect to it in order to restore self. We will also cover the gentle “laws” of engagement, such as: permission to pick, and giving thanks. We will then do a small exercise on scanning living plants to feel their energetic field/aura.

After that, each participant will decide on the plant subject that they wish to depict. We will then go into a hands-on session where we think about capturing the essence of a plant in an artwork, in an energetic way versus figuratively or realistically.

We will do a series of short exercises covering different ways of mark-making on paper before moving into a longer session where we try and capture on a small canvas the essence of the plant we are working with.

Each person will leave the session with tools to engage in a deeper way with the plant world, as well as their completed artwork to take home with them as a memento of this healing work together.

The aim of this session is to deepen our understanding of, and appreciation for the plant kingdom, especially when it comes to those plants and herbs with healing or restorative properties. This includes medicinal plants, food herbs, fragrance plants that are used in essential oils and aromatherapy, food plants, as well as plants and trees that hold codes for the wellbeing of people and this planet.

About the workshop facilitator:

Lauren Shantall

Instagram: @laurenshantall

Lauren Shantall currently works in acrylics on canvas. Plants and flowers continue to hold her attention as subjects in her artworks. She is both a painter and a practicing energy healer (Gift of Health, Quantum Sensory Healing and Usui Reiki). She also works in communications.

Her Artist statement:

Akin to the indoor plant movement prevalent in the 1970s, linked to the rise of Organicism as a lifestyle philosophy, today’s world foregrounds plants, in a more directed way, than ever. In this we can read so many things - reverence for nature, heightened awareness of greening and green issues, the place for plant therapy as an antidote to digital disconnection, and the need to express care and nurture growth and positivity.

My paintings embrace all of this. In my artworks, plants are expressively portrayed in both faithful and abstracted versions of themselves. Colour is a device that denotes joy, and marks that (im)perceptible surge of love that occurs when the subtle connections between living things - between plant being and human being, between growing person and plant teacher – are recognised and honoured.

About the artmaking process:

“I work directly from my subject – from a live plant or flower directly in front of me. I do not work from photographs as a general rule, although sometimes I have to if a flower is closing up shop and I won’t be able to paint it in time. I also do not do preparatory sketches as a general rule. For the most part my process is spontaneous and expressive. I have learnt to work very quickly as plants move (most track the sun and sometimes this is obvious such as opening leaves and flowers in the morning and closing them as dusk falls; and they grow or wither). So I need to capture a changing subject in a single sitting. When I chose a subject to paint there is an undeniable frisson or desire to capture how it is that plant or flower is making me feel. Foremost is the desire to convey to the viewer that moment of connection I felt when I looked at a subject and thought: “Oh my word, but aren’t you just spectacular!!!!!”