Art

I haven’t finished writing the fourth part on happiness yet, so today I’m posting a few more ink drawings (I had them scanned, but the edges have not been included. I’ll have to go to town and have them re-done, so until then I’m posting these versions). I’m also sharing a short extract from Alain de Botton and John Armstrong’s book, Art as Therapy (not Art Therapy), that I’m reading, about how art finds its purpose and value as a tool, and offers us means of assistance in relation to some universal human frailties.

According to the authors of the book, art is:

1. A CORRECTIVE OF BAD MEMORY: Art makes memorable and renewable the fruits of experience. It is a mechanism to keep precious things, and our best insights, in good condition and makes them publicly accessible….

2. A PURVEYOR OF HOPE: Art keeps pleasant and cheering things in view. It knows we despair too easily.
3. A SOURCE OF DIGNIFIED SORROW: Art reminds us of the legitimate place of sorrow in a good life, so that we panic less about our difficulties and recognize them as parts of a noble existence.
4. A BALANCING AGENT: Art encodes with unusual clarity the essence of our good qualities and holds them up before us, in a variety of media, to help rebalance our natures and direct us towards our best
5. A GUIDE TO SELF-KNOWLEDGE: Art can help us identify what is central to ourselves, but hard to put into words. Much that is human is not readily available in language. We can hold up art objects and say, confusedly but importantly, ‘This is me.’
6. A GUIDE TO THE EXTENSION OF EXPERIENCE: Art is an immensely sophisticated accumulation of the experiences of others, presented to us in well-shaped and well-organized forms. It can provide us with some of the most eloquent instances of the voices of other cultures, so that an engagement with artworks stretches our notions of ourselves and our world. At first, much of art seems merely ‘other’, but we discover that it can contain ideas and attitudes that we can make our own in ways that enrich us. Not everything we need to become better versions of ourselves is already to hand in the vicinity.
7. A RE-SENSITIZATION TOOL: Art peels away our shell and saves us from our spoilt, habitual disregard for what is all around us. We recover our sensitivity…..