Painters (Artists)

This ebook, An Alexander Technique Approach to Artists’ Painting Technique, is published on this website in a PDF format. It is very detailed and practical. It will give you the physical tools you need to take the limits off of your ability to create an extraordinary painting.
This ebook is also for sale on all AMAZON websites in a KINDLE format.
Located in Albuquerque, New Mexico, U.S.A. (MOVEMENT THERAPY)

The goal of the Alexander Technique is to help the artist create the most effortless and balanced painting technique and posture possible, so that the artist doesn’t have to struggle to paint. This isn’t always easy, because many artists bring misconceptions of what they are doing physically when they paint. In other words, the artist thinks they are doing one thing, when they are doing another thing.

What does this mean? Painting, as with most artistic disciplines, has a history of the rules of painting that has gotten passed from teacher to student etc., over generations of teachers and students. What is taught isn’t always an accurate representation of what is physically happening in painting.

Here are a few of my corrected misconceptions of movement in the body. You can’t lock the knees, you lock the thigh muscles to lock the knees. When you rotate the forearm, turning the hands over up and down, it is the biceps that rotate the forearms. When you move your hand side to side in relationship to the forearm, it is from long muscles tied to the elbows. When you move your fingers, it is from the forearms – the flexors and the extensors. When you support bent forearms, it is the brachialis, not the biceps for the most part.

Two of the above are critical for the artist. When the artist is aware that he or she moves the hand from the forearm, this means that the artist can create a conscious sense of ease and freedom in the hand and forearm as she or he paints. In other words when you have a misconception of how the body does something, then that belief causes the body to move with tension, because of the conflict between the believed lie and what is really happening.

Another issue with artists is that they are not aware there is no muscle in the forearm that supports the forearm. It is the brachialis (half biceps) that supports the forearm. Because so many artists have experienced tension in their forearm for years, whether it is conscious or unconscious, they experience the forearm as holding up the forearm. This isn’t true, and it contributes greatly to forearm pain, tension, and injury.

Returning back to the first paragraph of this article, if you believe the body does one thing, and it actually does another, then the conflict between your misconceptions and what really happens will contribute to pain, strain, and injury. So, when a art teacher tells a student something that is not true about how the body works, then it seems to really cause physical problems. Because the student is stacking statements from authority to back up misconceptions of what he or she is doing as they paint. This can really lead to strain and injury. It may take years, but many artists get in trouble eventually over a career of teaching and/or painting.

It is an extraordinary feeling when you are made aware of what you are really doing in an artistic activity. Every time I was given accurate information from an Alexander Technique teacher on what balanced posture and accurate movement in my guitar technique were, my classical guitar playing always improved dramatically.

It was truly as if I took off blinders, and could clearly see and experience how easy and free playing the guitar could be.