Visual Fitness 4 All: Engaging Creativity & Insight®

Week of May 10, 2025

Develop your visual fitness by exercising and building your creative muscles while enhancing your discernment skills. Enjoy unique interactive conversations and fun hands-on experiences that will engage you in SEEING MORE in art and life while at Rancho La Puerta.

Discover Deeper Meanings in Mexican Culture: Day of the Dead and Frida Kahlo’s Art
Use a Balanced Way of Seeing^® more as you experience an interactive, new way of understanding Mexican culture and artist Frida Kahlo (1907-1954). You will gain insight as you develop essential discernment skills noting the Form+Theme+Context (FTC)^® of symbols and traditions of Day of the Dead as well as Frida’s art to understand deeper meanings of Mexican life and art.

Conversing with Mexican Art: Up Close and Personal (60 min)
Engage in a hands-on, multi-sensory workshop to experience a guided, in-depth personal “conversation” with a postcard-sized reproduction to meanings in a Mexican work of art.  Using a packet of playful materials and creative strategies, each participant explores an artwork to reveals its layers of meaning.  This fun workshop concludes with an opportunity for lively group sharing of observations and discoveries.

Visual Fitness: Creativity Exercises with LINE + COLOR (120 min)
Develop your innate creative skills in this hands-on “workout” that uses Marking & Mapping^® to discover your “visual voice” and “inner artist” as you engage in visual meditation and warm-up exercises.  Have fun making playful marks using unique art tools that help you create a life map that reflects meaningful virtues, words, images, and events.  This eye-opening experience requires absolutely no previous art experience and results in a special souvenir to take home. Join us and surprise yourself!

 

Inspired by her profound experiences creating art and presenting at the Ranch for over 20 years, Renee Sandell’s Visual Fitness 4 All^® programs is the result of her over 45 years of art teaching experience in classrooms and museums. Believing in the power of art to facilitate human interaction, transformation, and healing, Renee’s art, teaching, and research focus on Visual Fitness 4 All.  A retired university professor, Sandell is the author of three books and multiple publications.  She was founder/director of SummerVision DC—a 4-day, museum-based, intensive bootcamp program she led for a decade until the Pandemic. Sandell has received awards for her Form+Theme+Context (FTC)® methodology as a Balanced Way of Seeing^®.  Sandell’s Visual Fitness courses and “workouts” are dedicated to engaging Creativity and Insight^®in everyone, everywhere.  She currently teaches for Smithsonian Associates Studio Arts, Yellow Barn Studio, and other arts organizations and venues. Renee is an actively exhibiting artist; learn more on her website and YouTube interview.