When a person creates art, or when they experience other people’s art, they are making a connection. More than just about the making of art or the simple seeing of something new, art is about the meaning we seek both in ourselves as well as in our connection with the world.
Sometimes we would like to do something differently and break with routine. Especially when the old story no longer serves us or we have experiences that we wish to release. Art can be a wonderful medicine to open the channels to facilitate this.
“Art attracts us only by what it reveals of our most secret self.”
- Jean-Luc Godard
I believe art helps us forge new pathways to seeing the world. It activates connections within us through attention to cues such as colour and symbols and has the ability to shift our thinking and our emotions both positively and negatively. I think marketers and advertisers have long known this and use such persuasive techniques to sell their products and services. Psychology refers to this as spatial intelligence or our ability to visually identify a concept & understand its relationship with other objects within its environment.
In this way I think art becomes more than the sum of its parts. It has the capacity to calm, to excite, to simplify, to expand and even to heal through the magic of connection. After all isn’t that what we are really looking for? The ability to relate and be stopped in our tracks when we make that connection, even for just a moment.
