FLY stands for Free the Life within You, after many workshops I delivered worldwide I offer a complete tutorial online on how to demonstrate and practice this inspiring method of self-expression. we use oil, tar, and acrylic colors flowing on canvas creating unexpected combinations and forms. our tools are sticks and spatulas we can work on canvas, wood, or paper. the outcome is always surprising. it is important to notice that there are no experience or pre-requirements for this course.

there are FLY workshops dedicated to designers, architects, therapists, educators, artists, and even to managers or HR recruiters

The FLY method is about three main elements:

FLOW

LAYERS

MERGING

Though it seems like a painting class it is not. From the many FLY workshops, I led around the globe I learned that there are wider applications to this very simple technique, and this has to do with those three above-mentioned ingredients I will elaborate about.

Flow – has to do with life, health, freedom, purity, new ideas.

Think about a river that its natural wisdom leads him to the sea. A human being that doesn't flow is stuck, to be stuck in the human body means an unhealthy situation, in Chinese medicine treatments an essential part is dedicated to renewing and balancing the energetic flow in the human body. In FLY we pour colors on canvases and let them flow we use chopsticks to direct the colors and to form the imagined shapes in our minds. The canvas is but the mirror to our soul, this free self-expression leads to an intuitive creative process without any prejudgment, borders, or right and wrong conceptions.

Flow has to do with connecting the dots, I'll call that sharing. A human being with flowing energy is open, radiant, vital, and willing to share so the movement on the canvas resonates with one of the most important assets in human life, the ability and necessity to move and it is not only a physical movement from point A to point B but the flow of new emotions and ideas that can happen while sitting still.

Layers – archeology and human beings work the same, what is precious is hidden, excavations are about moving a lot of dirt and dust to understand what the archeology site is all about. Sometimes pearls of nature are located on battlefields like Megiddo or Austerlitz, what is revealed can be deceiving what can be found can be surprising. The deeper you go into a historic site the more eras you discover. there are sites like Jericho or Jaffa in which more than 10 layers were revealed.

A human being is much more complicated than any archeological site, the human is the creator of the sites so they are responsible for every layer found in any excavation, in each human, there are much more layers than any historic site, sometimes it is a layer each month or year sometimes layers are about emotions, intuition, mental disturbing habits or beauty that is a camouflage of agony. Psychology is about making order in human beings' layered system. It is very hard to erase a layer because memories are engraved in the brain and stressing extreme memories can turn into trauma, so life is ongoing building new layers on top of existing ones, if you can t erase them join them or merge them or try to make the best of the variety of memories and emotion.

In the FLY workshop, we build layer upon layer each made up of contradicting ingredients as tar, acrylic, and oil colors all ingredients after dried can be coated with lacquer or could be the basis of a new layer on top. Unlike an archeology site, we start with the deepest layer and mark our way to the first and ultimate layers.

The number of layers depends on the artist's inner feeling and expression, in my paintings I use 7 layers on average.

Merging – we are all different, but yet made out of the same ingredients. If all our building blocks were similar life couldn't exist, it is the variety that is the life expression and the mélange between materials and essences that make Planet Earth and all living beings upon it flourish.

Variety is the mixture of opposite ingredients like air and water, fire and iron, black and white. Merging is an essential part of our lives on the physical level it can be man and woman in the spiritual realm, the spirit with the universe's ray of creation. Every learning has to do with merging, every new idea, and result, sharing is merging information between human beings as working together for a common goal is merging individual efforts into a collective purpose.

In the FLY workshop, the merging aspect is done by applying different and sometimes opposing materials such as oil and watercolors, tar with gesso, and turpentine. When applying those opposing colors, it makes like local explosions on the canvas that can be seen as fractals, with each and every layer those strange forms merge with one another to produce the FLY new self-expression work.

Those 3 elements, flow, merge and layers are the core elements of every FLY workshop and individual FLY creation. We don t have to try hard or to implement a lot of effort, it just happens naturally on the canvas.

I am here for any question or assistance, you can write to me with the Udemy platform or by mail at [email protected]

Have magic in your life

Ted Barr