Art Heals: How Creativity Cures the Soul

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McNiff explores the creative space, the art therapist as artist, images as angels, artistic auras and their medicines, the shaman within, and art therapy as a spectrum of partnerships. They are better able to name their emotional experiences, and they use more words to express themselves. Therapy sessions—in groups or with individuals—provide time for engaging all the senses and integrating these aesthetic experiences so that participants can reimagine and rework established neural pathways to establish new ways of seeing, thinking, and experiencing. It also takes in many real life experiences, detailing how certain making methods helped them to process a difficult time emotionally.

For another 8 year old student, also with significant social/emotional difficulties and prone to bouts of rage, I had a ready supply of paint and paper because otherwise he was inclined to mark all over the walls and table tops. Her latest record, The Family Curse—released last November—explores the root of her mental health challenges: intergenerational trauma and family mental illness. We learn how to transform the most mundane aspects of life through artistic encounters and to engage with our most painful challenges creatively. It really was a turning point in my life because I started a regular practice of studio painting and mixed media artwork that to this day has been a blessing in my life and in the lives of people I teach.

I won’t say that assemblage art is much like life itself, but it’s closer to existence than any other art form.

The challenge, then, is first to free our creativity and then to sustain it as a disciplined process. Visualize your inner light with educator Jackie Armstrong and uncover new ways of relating to Dorothea Tanning’s First Peril. Art therapists guide people in connecting or reconnecting with the creative practices that support mental health, and that help people to grapple with life challenges and uncertainties.In addition, some artists have been known to consciously compose their works to help heal viewers, such as the German Renaissance painter, Matthias Grünewald, whose famous Isenheim Altarpiece commissioned for a hospital was meant to inspire a sense of “inner balance” among the sick patients there.