Why Art?
By Heather Roan
When we think of healing, it’s often in terms of a deficit. The person needs more time, medicine, therapy, or some other digestible 21st century product. From this perspective, it’s easy to assume that the only path to healing is consumption. However, we don’t have to think of healing in this way. If we look at healing through a lens of abundance, or “enough,” then we can imagine new methods of healing that allow people to focus their energy on something outside of their physical or mental wellness. At The Art Room we see our clients as creators. Instead of asking them to only focus on themselves, we ask them to express their emotions and experiences onto a medium. It is through this method that our creators have produced numerous breathtaking pieces of art, which both validate their experiences and carve a pathway for others to understand them.
The expression of experience into art has been a part of human life for centuries. To create, it seems, is to fulfill our biological destiny at a fundamental level. As we look at ancient art to understand the cultures of the past, we can also look at the art we create today to understand ourselves and how we interact with the society that surrounds us. Without painfully lengthy conversations about politics or ethics, art gives us a space to manifest the world we experience into a physical idea that other people can then interpret and craft a personal relationship with. Through creation and recognition, we can understand one another as humans, living our lives as best we can.
Just as there’s no one-way to live life, there’s no one-way to do art. The Art Room provides a diverse range of mediums for creators to experiment with, such as watercolor, acrylic paint, and even recently, paint-based calligraphy markers. While it can be easy to limit oneself to a particular style of art, The Art Room staff encourages creators to reach outside of their comfort zone and try new mediums, with the understanding that this can lead people to worlds of creation and skill they weren’t aware of before. With a focus on the process of art-making instead of the end-result, art allows for, as Bob Ross would put it, “happy little accidents.” In this way, art-making mirrors life, as we work hard to reach our goals, and then so suddenly find something different and exciting to try. When we are able to take small-level risks in the creation of art, we can model these decisions in our daily life and feel the same freedom of trying new things.
As humans, we are blessed to have a choice to interpret the life around us through any lens we wish. In a world that continually values consumption above creation, let's make the choice to see the possibility in every person instead of the challenges they may have to overcome. Let’s choose to see our world and our bodies as abundant with creativity and ability. Let’s choose to make art from life and draw life from art.