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Imagine a table brimming with paints in the center of a room. The lights are just bright enough to illuminate inspirational quotes strewn about the room. Candles burn in a corner and music drifts past. Ten people sit around the table, as if entranced. Colors fly from palette to canvas. They mix and swirl, as if connected by an invisible energy flowing among the painters, paint and canvas. The canvases portray nothing. There are no definitive shapes or messages. But go one level deeper—to the core emotions in the room. Now the canvases reveal everything.
This is a meditative painting class at Sandra Fioramonti’s Liverpool Art Center, 101 Lake Drive, Liverpool. The space has served as a haven for artists and non-artists alike—anyone in need of healing—for the last 10 years.
“The community aspect of this is tremendous,” says Fioramonti. “I recently had Joanne Shenandoah here. She came in here and presented a talk, and afterward she sent me an email and she thanked me for allowing her to come in to experience the community that comes here to enjoy my sanctuary. And I was, ‘Wow, it is a sanctuary, isn’t it?’ It never struck me before that.”
On Friday, June 1, Fioramonti’s sanctuary will celebrate its 10th anniversary. The festivities last from 5 to 8 p.m. at the center, and range from the display of art to live music to a dinner buffet to a drumming demonstration by Fioramonti herself. Tickets cost $5.
Fioramonti’s role as art teacher and gallery owner began years ago when she faced a tragedy. “My husband passed away from colon cancer in 2002. Just watching him struggle. . . he hadn’t really lived his life at age 38,” says Fioramonti, a single mother of two boys. “After he passed away, I promised myself that I would not be at that point when my time came.”
Fioramonti grew up surrounded by galleries. Her mother, Elizabeth Dardis, owned The Artworks, a gallery on James Street in Syracuse. “I grew up behind art shows. By age 11, I could hang a show,” Fioramonti says. “So immediately {after my husband’s passing}, I went right back to the arts and said ‘OK, what do I want to do?’ So I opened an art gallery, Artistic Innovations, in Baldwinsville.”
Eventually Fioramonti found her way to Liverpool and opened the center near Onondaga Lake, where she teaches every class. “Along the way I had developed a program that helps people find the artist within themselves, in contrast to how most art instructors will teach what they know, and the students will develop a style that looks like their teacher’s,” says Fioramonti. “I design them around the students’ needs.”
Take a glance around the Liverpool Art Center and you’ll see that Fioramonti’s words ring true. Student works, boasting a myriad of styles, media and subjects, tile the walls. “That says that I’m helping them discover what’s inside: their style, their technique, what suits them, their personality, what’s going to help them grow not only as a person, but as a creative being,” explains Fioramonti of her teaching approach. “They face challenges and we talk through them and their artwork reflects that breakthrough. It’s this big ebb and flow of challenge, facing the challenge, healing and moving forward.”
Jack Ryan, 72, of Liverpool, has been a student of Fioramonti’s for more than two years. After taking art classes at BOCES, someone recommended him to Fioramonti’s studio. “Her approach to teaching is unbelievable in that she doesn’t demand, ‘This is the way you should go, follow the lines.’ It’s like, ‘Do what you want to do, and how can I help you get there?’
“She pulled me through all kinds of hell. She gave me a hard time,” he says jokingly, directing his voice for a moment toward Fioramonti.
From the opposite side of the studio: “I’m not listening, Jack!” says Fioramonti
Turning back, Ryan confides with a twinkle in his eye, “She’s one of the greatest people I know.”
Ryan is one of Fioramonti’s more than 300 students, 200 of whom visit the studio on a weekly basis. “In the classroom when they’re all sitting down, it’s not even slightly a challenge. There’s a flow that happens. I feel guided,” Fioramonti says. “With everything that comes up, if they face a challenge, if they’re frustrated—and you can tell because they go silent, and they’re just sitting there and you can see that frustration growing to anger, and then I’ll walk over at just the right moment. And then they’ll explain what they just went through and I’ll help them through that moment. So that’s the flow. And literally you can feel it climax and decrease and climax and decrease through any given class. It’s a very spiritual way of teaching.”
Fioramonti’s spiritual approach comes from her own experiences, and is perhaps best witnessed during a meditative class. “{That class} evolved from my own creative process. I was blocked. Nothing would come out,” says Fioramonti, thinking back to a point in her career when she was strictly a watercolorist. “So one night, at 2 a.m., Pink Floyd raging as loud as I could without waking the boys up, I threw on acrylic paint, canvas after canvas, just smeared colors. It looked awful. At the time, I was learning a lot of Native American traditions for healing, for grieving, for letting go and moving forward. And what I discovered was all these different healing modalities, mixed with this ‘let it go’ creative process. It was a way to not think about how to heal, but to heal anyway.”
After a while, Fioramonti’s students started noticing the growing number of healing canvases, and asked if it was possible for her to teach this method. Not quite knowing how to proceed, Fioramonti tried it with a few students. “The results were chilling. They were amazing. To watch somebody else go through that process that I went through was eye opening,” Fioramonti says. “I kind of morphed that into a structured class. Anyone can do it. It’s for artists and non-artists, people who don’t paint at all. The meat of that class is, ‘OK, now we’re doing to do a guided meditation. And as soon as we’re at this certain point, this climax of meditation, I’m going to pull you out quickly and you’re going to paint in that meditative trance.’ And immediately, they kind of looked like, ‘OK. . . ’”
Fioramonti pauses to emphasize the students’ initial apprehension. “They’re a little afraid. But the meditation is designed to physically, mentally and spiritually put them in a place where there is no fear. There is no judgment. It is self-acceptance, pure.”
This assurance that the Liverpool Art Center is a sanctuary from judgment keeps people coming back. “They realize how much the creative process can help them in other ways. It’s not just about painting and putting something pretty on your wall: It’s the process,” Fioramonti explains. “Open yourself up, look at the white of that canvas. Face that fear, that fear that it’s not going to be good, it’s not going to be something that reflects you, or somebody’s going to see something that you don’t want them to see. And get past that and do it anyway.”
And if you just want to learn how to paint, you can try out
Fioramonti’s classes in acrylic, watercolor and oil; she gives private
art lessons as well. For further information, visit
www.liverpoolartcenter.com or call 234-9333.
