Art therapy

Posted by admin on Nov 18, 2008 in Arts & Culture | 0 comments

Art is a primary and natural form of human communication. Cave-people used their art to tell their stories and to relay the emotion of the hunt or scenes from everyday life. Children instinctively draw figures with whatever on hand, scribbling on walls with crayons or forming mud sculptures. Most university students make art everyday in class when they doodle ceaselessly to fill the moments of boredom. Altogether, art is elemental to our humanity, something we naturally do. More recently, a scientific approach to using art for healing has arisen in the form of art therapy.

For centuries people have used art as a way to heal their inner brokenness, like the artist Frida Kahlo.

Kahlo was a Mexican painter in the early 20th century, who used art as her own brand of healing. She confronted the thoughts, pain and desires of her mind through her projects. She made her personal problems real by portraying them on canvas: her yearning for children, her tempestuous relationship with her husband, her depression.

I remember first seeing Kahlo’s work in grade ten during art class and being deeply impacted. I was confused by her paintings – the way that she placed her subjects, her depictions of herself, her metaphors – but they still struck me. There was raw emotion that leapt out of the picture plane; it amazed me. Art can do this. It can mean so much to a random teenager 50 years after the artist tried to confront her issues because it is, as she said, a “primary human impulse.”

Janet Oakes, Vancouver art therapist and psychoanalyst, says that the reason art is so conducive to therapy is because it “makes the unconscious conscious” as much as possible, illuminating unconscious areas that were before misunderstood or completely ignored. The characteristics of art and art-making are used to effect healing when it is used “as a process to work through emotional and cognitive difficulties that people experience,” says Oakes. Art has a way of putting one at ease that is well utilized in therapy, because patients are often terrified to put themselves out to be examined and pulled apart. It is used in conjunction with speaking to create a calming and honest atmosphere.

Often in art therapy, themes and questions arise in the artwork of a patient that were before unrecognized or ignored by he or she; those issues can then be confronted. The images of a mind can be shown without the needless words that are so often hard to find. Because of these factors, art therapy is incredibly useful in confronting one’s personal issues. Often it serves to make the difficulty real in the mind of the patient so that it can later be addressed by psychoanalysis or psychology.
Art therapy is a rather recent conception in its newest sense, though it has been utilized in an unofficial way for millennia. The science of applying psychoanalysis and psychology to art is new but the therapeutic act of making art is not a recent development; it is one of the most instinctual impulses of humanity.

As I talked to Oakes, I became aware of a beautiful release in the action of art itself, in the way the movement stimulates thought and introspection.

Because humans think first in images and then in descriptive words, there is so much that can be communicated through visual art compared to what can be said. In conversation, there are taboo subjects only spoken of behind closed doors that can be breached in art. It can provide a safe outlet for physical feelings. Whereas words and feelings change and past experiences are forgotten, a piece of art stands as a symbol of that emotion. It won’t disappear or change with time.

Art is a beautiful part of human nature which stands alone in its ability to communicate human emotion and action because of its close connection to the psyche.