What You Should Know About Healing With Visual Arts

I

Man Carrying A Child. 2018, oil on linen, 120 x 80 cm

 

More and more people seek help to their personal, everyday issues through bettering their environment, including homespace, that obviously influences the way we think, feel and act. Something made by hand carries a different force and effect than the colour and material of a random couch or table. Many artists are studying art therapy to make the best for humanity, and earn their own plus points for it, as well. That is just fair.

 

What I came across to think, has little by little become my understanding about helping people with art. And with all my experiences in the field, I have come to the point where I seriously believe, that what you see, might not be what you get. 

 

I firmly believe, that rather than forms, shapes and colours, we are empowered or left without strong alignment to the essence, by the actual thoughts and feelings that have been put into the artworks; and that is something no artschool teaches. On the brilliant side, the viewer most often understands the existence of something great or the lack of it, and that is not dependant on the personal opinion in terms of worshipping the painting. 

 

I am talking about power that is bigger than the visual. Let's say, most people can draw a cat or a human being, so what makes Rembrandt so special? It is the light that he has managed to develop within himself, to put through his hand into his artworks and share it with the world. 

If all that would not be true, how come the most depressed, seriously problematic personas, having drug and alcohol addictions, created masterpieces in our time? Because never minding the outter circumstances, not caring for anybody or anything, their only intention, purpose and will was serving the painting for its own sake.

And that's where the force was laid. 

II

Sunflower Swan. 2018, oil on linen, 120 x 90 cm

 

It is a strong force, this life force. I am sure this is the one carrying life itself. The force that exists before birth and continues to rise after we've gone. It doesn't care much about the personal preferations, it cares about the non-existing of disturbing elements. 

The artist has to remove everything that gets in the way of making his/her best art, that is the only way to act. Thinking that this heart shape will bring loveluck to the person who watches it, is a mere illusion or even a trap. One must not believe anything like it. 

Even the black, seriously depressive-seeming canvases can eat up the excess energy that comes with giving up addictions or any other bad traits.

One must never get locked into looking with non-open mind. Art is more than can be seen with a bare eye, but luckily, a lot of it carries no significant force.

That is why I don't believe just therapeutic works can do the work. 

Sometimes you need exactly that very dark night of the soul to get you going, moving, entering something larger than life that is filled with so much light,

you could have never imagined. 

III

 

That leaves me to assure, if the content fits, most likely the visual appearance does just as well. The content is what matters and most people can understand it by just looking at it for a few moments. 

 

It is not a shape that can change someone's life, not the diploma for being able to draw and know this and that about medical terms, but that force you are actually able to channel, that leaves the work with marks of a powerful mind, that has had the connection to everexpanding source. Intuitively, you know which colours you need. You know which figures you want to feel through your eyes everyday. 

 

To make the most of historical and modern knowledge, trust yourself. You can encode. Transform your living into celebration through your issues with your own knowledge and do choose art as a nice companion, just to make your life more beautiful and more active: the artwork should have energy flowing through and out of it, not be some still life nut in a shell on the wall. That would really be of no use.

 

The painting should remind you of the similarities of human needs, it should give you the actual, purely honest ourburst, that has gotten us where we are today, on one opened globe as pretty united souls thanks to the collaboration of forces that we cannot actually see, but whose fruit we can harvest, and enjoy. 

If you have had any experiences with using art for therapeutic effects or have an opinion on the topic, please be so kind to open up and speak your mind in the comments below. Thank you.