I am Fernanda Clariana. My last name is originally from Cataluña, Spain. It means "Clear space between the clouds, or Clear Light." I was born in BERNAL, Buenos Aires, Argentina... City of Tango, mate, and prolific "life-long" friendships.

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A Personal Story of Healing through Arts

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Fernanda Clariana was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina. She holds a bachelor’s degree in Graphic Arts and Communication, from the National University of Buenos Aires and a master’s degree in Organizational Leadership, from The Graduate Institute, Connecticut. In addition, Fernanda is a Reiki Master practitioner/instructor, and a Qigong practitioner/instructor.

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Fernanda began her career in the United States at a newspaper in Colorado, and then as a graphic designer and art director in New York City. Currently at Yale New Haven Hospital, she creates and implements holistically-oriented programs to enhance the patient and staff experience. Her unique Complementary Health Program “Oasis for Healing” received the 2015 Extraordinary Program Award from the American Hospital Association. Fernanda is the Coordinator for Smilow Cancer Hospital’s creative art volunteers and musicians. She is also a member of the Auxiliary Art Committee at Yale New Haven Hospital, and assists with selection and display organization of visual art in the hospital.

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One of Fernanda’s passions has long been to explore the process of expressive artistic creation, and among other artistic pursuits including music and poetry, she began painting in high school and continued for many years. However, more recently, for several years Fernanda felt artistically and emotionally unable to paint.

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Then suddenly in the summer of 2016, Fernanda underwent emergency brain surgery, In those challenging times, she started expressing her feelings, emotions, and spirituality once again, in paintings – and she has not stopped painting since. She feels that her artistic expression flows naturally once again, and at the same time, she experiences her art as a way of self healing and practices mindful painting one brush stroke at a time, enjoying every color and shape that emerges.

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Studies indicate that artistic expression can change a person’s attitude and, following upon that, their physiology: the body’s physiology can change from stress-response to a state of deep relaxation, from fight-or-flight to a state conducive to creativity and inspiration. Art can change a person’s perceptual and emotional states. Art, meditation, and other healing modalities all can enhance our adaptive responses and our inner focus, freeing us to (re-)enter the world of emotional imagery and visions. Fernanda’s paintings reflect her inner visions, and with apparent subject matters from the recognizable to the surreal, always somehow, outright or mysteriously, show us numinous scapes of fore-sight and in-sight, thought and memory, journey and emotion.

 

One of Fernanda’s favorite paintings emerged after deep meditation, just before her brain surgery. "Volvimiento" re-presents a vision of and feeling for a subliminal place, where kindred souls are awaiting our arrival, in bliss and well-being: as we move in(ward), this place opens before or within us, somehow at the same time new and familiar, intriguing and warm, bizarre and enticing; fascinating us with alterations of, and holding us weightless within, recognition of these colored geometric landscapes and these vibrations of the homeward heart. 

 

For Fernanda, the challenges she has gone through have brought her back to her art, with renewed passion and new vision. Her inward journey has found, created, and inspired the colors, shapes, and themes of her work; her art unfolds and reveals for us this journey. Fernanda paints in quiet moments as she allows her inner vision to guide her; from which emerge both the familiar and the startling, the enticing and the intriguing, the blissful and the bizarre.

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                                                                                                                               by Gamelyn Dykstra