Professor’s Note: Students needed to find a sketch that spoke to them, choose the colors, and complete coloring according to their own meanings and emotions.

It’s an hour or so after dinner; everyone is in the living room watching T.V. or off doing their own thing. I’m sitting at my five foot dining room table, where I have ample room to spread out my art supplies. The dining room is mine.

I keep everything I might need no more than an arm’s length away. I like working here because the room is well lit and quiet, with no distractions. I always work at this table when doing projects for my art classes. I require this type of environment to do creative work; it helps me to focus and be in touch with myself, which starts the creative juices flowing. I’ve just finished an art project I’ve been working on, one due the next day. I can feel the muscles in my shoulders and neck tightening up. My chiropractor told me that this is where I hold my tension.

I don’t feel guilty about spending time coloring tonight, since all my schoolwork is done. Instead, I look through all the designs and choose a mandala because they are so beautiful and  intricate. How nice it would be to make art for the sake of just making art! As I begin, I feel like a child again, coloring in my coloring book, on the floor of my bedroom. This was always my favorite pastime. No stress, no deadlines,  no pressure: just me and my pencils, markers, and my large box of Crayola crayons, whose waxy smell I still remember.

As I color, I can feel the tension leaving my body. My shoulders and neck don’t feel so tight any more. I have no sense of time, which is wonderful. I know that I didn’t have to complete the picture in one sitting, but I also don’t want to stop. Not once while I was coloring do I think of it as homework or a chore. I just allow myself to enjoy it.

When I finish the mandala, I feel relaxed and happy. Working with the patterns and colors calms me, brings me joy. In a positive sense, it feels almost addictive. I know that when we are engaged in pleasurable activities, endorphins, the feel good chemicals, are released in the brain. I wonder if this is the explanation for the enjoyment felt when creating art. Satisfaction, well-being, accomplishment, happiness . . . and also the revival of good memories from my childhood that came flooding back as I colored. For instance, finishing a coloring book page and running to my mom, who would pin it up on the refrigerator door and praise my artistic talent. It’s surprising, how much the act of coloring affects my memory, summoning people, places and incidents that I haven’t thought of in years. Childhood is such a purely beautiful time of life and anything that can bring it back, even for a little bit, is precious.

My experience is just one example of how art therapy helps people get in touch with their thoughts, memories and emotions, and even helps them work through problems. According to Davies et al, art therapy improves well-being and increases self-awareness, self-esteem and self-reflection. Because visual art doesn’t require words to articulate what’s going on inside oneself, using art as therapy is like using a key  to open a locked door. Indeed, Christina Davies and fellow researchers found that even recreational art, done purely for enjoyment, also positively affects social, mental and physical well-being, mirroring the effects of art as therapy. Meanwhile, H.L. Stuckey and J. Nobel state that art therapy helps those enduring emotionally and physically difficult situations, helping them to express what they can’t put into words (Stuckey and Nobel).

I look through all the designs and choose a mandala because they are so beautiful and  intricate. How nice it would be to make art for the sake of just making art!

Beyond this, Davies notes that therapeutic art benefits not only physical and mental health, but also social health as well. Involving a community in art participation, such as painting a mural in the neighborhood together, can foster tolerance, respect, trust, communication, friendship and civic pride. According to Davies, such communal interaction increases the perception of belonging. I think this would be especially meaningful to people who live alone, or for the elderly, who often don’t feel included in the larger community and who experience feelings of isolation.

Using music as therapy produces similar benefits to the visual arts. I learned this when, for one assignment, we were asked to listen to ten minutes of three different types of music. I liked the Gregorian chants, and had noticed beneficial responses to the music. As I listened, my breathing became noticeably slower and deeper. I felt so calm and relaxed. I even listened more than twice as long as instructed, because the music took me to a very spiritual place that I found comforting. No wonder that, as Stuckey and Nobel point out, music therapy stands out as the most researched form of arts therapy. As they show, the auditory stimulation of music can reduce pain, calms the brain’s neural activity, reduce anxiety and stress, and promote emotional balance. According to their research, music therapy can even increase immunity (especially notable in cancer patients). Meanwhile, Boyce and Bungay concur that music therapy produces “statistically significant” beneficial effects for one’s heart rate, blood pressure and respiratory rates. I don’t think that we even have a drug that can do that! If there were such a drug, we all would have taken it during the Covid 19 pandemic.

I never could have imagined that art therapy can achieve as many proven benefits as these research papers show us. There must  be something somewhere deep in the human psyche that gives us the innate appreciation of art and of beauty: something that doesn’t have to be taught or learned, something inborn, dating back 65,000 years, to when we communicated our hopes and fears by painting and drawing on cave walls. Is that what we tap into with visual art therapy? We have been told of the many positive effects of art and music therapy on the brain and body. I feel sure that it has an equal or greater effect on the heart and soul.