It’s art fair season! As you’re strolling through an art festival on a lovely summer day, what pieces should you bring home? Which ones will have the most positive effects on your life?
For our purposes today, let’s describe art as paintings, photographs, sculptures, etc., that we choose to surround ourselves with because we like to look at them—and our “art” can be full-size or reduced to fit on a postcard, original, or a reproduction. For our current discussion, we’ll ignore audio art (like music), kinesthetic art (such as dance), literature, and drama, etc. We’ll be focusing on the sorts of stuff you might encounter on display in the Louvre or the Metropolitan Museum of Art or your local art gallery.
The reason that most of us add art to our world is that doing so gives us a big psychological push toward wellbeing, at least when we get to select it (Chatterjee, 2013).
Choosing art is a way we can exercise some control over our lives and just doing that gives us a more positive mindset to meet the world and helps our brains work more effectively, regularly improving our cognitive performance (Dutton, 2009).
The Unique Appeal of Nature in Art
Art can also help us decompress and revitalize, particularly if it shows nature scenes.
- The vacation photographs that seem to get the most “oohs” and “aahs” are always shots of nature. Whether they’re landscape or portrait, tropical or deciduous, with or without wildlife doesn’t seem to matter much. We like looking at images of nature, whether we’ve photographed a scene ourselves or not (Herzog, Maguire, and Nebel, 2003).
- Our fondness for nature scenes makes sense, particularly if the sites shown look like they’re complete with the resources that would have been handy, survival-wise, for our species when it was young (Dutton, 2009). It seems that all the sensory processing circuits in our brains have developed to find it desirable to encounter the sorts of conditions that would have signaled to us that food was likely nearby and escape from predators that found us tasty would be possible (Dutton, 2009). According to Dutton (2009), these responses are so fundamental that just looking at the sorts of spaces where we would have thrived eons ago gives us a psychological boost, improving our mood and cognitive performance.
- When we see nature scenes, either in photographs or in paintings, our stress levels fall, our mental performance improves, and we are mentally refreshed (Herzog, Maguire, and Nebel, 2003).
- The sorts of nature scenes that are most useful for elevating our mental state are images that seem ready for us to step into (Dutton, 2009). Our brains do realize we won’t be able to merge into an image, even though that seems to happen all the time in movies (For example, have you seen the scene when Mary Poppins steps into the chalk drawing?), but we like to think we could. A relatively clear foreground, without a blocking hedge or fence, for example, is something we feel we can step into.
- The “best” nature images feature clumps of trees that look ready for climbing spread across a meadow (Dutton, 2009). It’s fine if there’s some sign of human life, say a cottage in the distance or a gently curving road, but the weather should be stellar and the terrain in relatively good shape (not recently decimated by a wildfire, for example). Bonus mental welfare points accrue if there is a gently burbling brook or peaceful lake in view. Signs of nearby predators—say lions, tigers, or bears—are undesirable, as are jungle-like plant growth that would make it difficult for humans to see trouble approaching. Research also shows that seeing close-up images of flowers, ones where the blooms fill the frame, but stems aren’t obvious, can speed our return to normal after we’ve been stressed.
- Images of nature can help us live our best lives and avoid being debilitated by everyday stressors (Herzog, Maguire, and Nebel, 2003). Nature images will work for you, even if you don’t have much time (vacation or otherwise) to work on them. Fancy printing and frames aren’t required for positive returns on effort invested.
- We’re more positive about the art we create ourselves than we are about art made by others, so try, at least, to be objective about which of your own pieces you choose to display.
Consciously use art to brighten your life and to achieve your personal and professional objectives.
Denis Dutton. 2009. The Art Instinct,Bloomsbury Press.
Anjan Chatterjee. 2013. The Aesthetic Brain: How We Evolved to Desire Beauty and Enjoy Art.Oxford University Press, New York.
Thomas Herzog, Colleen Maguire, and Mary Nebel. 2003. “Assessing the Restorative Components of Environments.” Journal of Environmental Psychology, vol. 23, pp. 159-170.
