breathlines

1. 

   Welcome yourself and others.

2. 

   Attend to your breath as we stretch, sit down, and pause for a few minutes in meditation. We paint as we exhale.

3. 

   Let go of your intentions. Our method is blindly to lay down lines of black paint, and from the nest of these lines to tease out images and stories. The lines are laid down with the motion of our exhaling breath. We let go of our paintings as possessions and invite others to add their breathlines to our own.

4. 

   Play
   Our goal is to revisit the imagination we all recall from childhood. So we play, sharing as children do when they look together into the clouds and tell stories about what they see.

5. 

   Discover
   We release the images that speak to us by whiting out the lines entangling them. We embrace our stories by acknowledging them. We paint over the lines we have removed so not even shadows remain.

6. 

   Complete your offering. We honour the spontaneity of our original breathlines. We choose simple colours, and attend to our breath as we apply them. We are patient, and permit ourselves to meditate upon the emotions our paintings evoke, as well as their stories.

7. 

   Celebrate
   Our painting and story-making is full of laughter and sympathy. We celebrate one another’s discoveries. We celebrate the stages of a painting’s development, and when it is done we invite our friends and anyone near to honour the completed work.

8. 

   Offer
   Breathlines is a practice and therefore an offering to ourselves. We receive from the practice what we invest in it. We do not sell our original paintings, though we exhibit them with pride and often give them to others. From the beginning of the painting process to its end, breathlines are offerings…to ourselves, and to others.

Communities of breathlines Painters

Breathlines is practiced throughout the world, from the boreal forests of Saskatchewan to the concrete of Tehran, by high school students in Ottawa to geriatric care workers in Swabia, Germany.

Read more about the communities of breathlines painters, and more about where and how they live and play.

Breathlines Journal

Why breathlines? An open letter to those who wish to help others.

What are the needs that breathlines addresses?

Method, Practice & Teaching

A manual on method and practice. The breathlines method is blindly to lay down lines of black paint on paper, and from the nest of these lines to tease out images and stories that are meaningful to the person who discovers them.
Download the 10Mb PDF.

A manual on teaching. The goal of breathlines is to motivate healing, learning and expression. Its model is the play of children. It culminates in the opportunity to express in language a painting’s story.
Download the 17Mb PDF.