The Mental Health Benefits of Creating Art

The mental health benefits of creating art vary for each artist. These may include lowering anxiety, quieting negative thoughts, and lifting mood. Painting and drawing help you stay present, and studies suggest they may even delay the onset of dementia. Here, six artists answer the question, “How does making art help your mental health?”

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The Mental Health Benefits of Creating Art

 

Meg Buick

I find drawing very grounding. When I hear people talk about what they get from meditation or mindfulness it sounds very familiar, because every so often when I’m drawing, and really looking at something, my mind becomes very clear and very awake, and it’s like the volume has been turned down on all my other, more verbal thoughts. I think I’m very driven by the process of making images, but it’s also something that keeps me sane! If I can’t sleep then I can always start planning a complex multi-layered etching in my mind and it gives me something to focus on.

 

 

I teach drawing online where I talk through a lot of these exercises, and when I teach beginners I often try to introduce the idea of “contour drawing” and move people away from drawing the outline of the object. We naturally draw edges, but it can be much easier to “discover” a subject through drawing if we let our marks travel across the whole of the form.

 

About Meg Buick

Meg Buick is a painter and printmaker who also regularly teaches drawing and painting. Her work explores nature and the passing of time and draws influence from the Italian Renaissance and French Post-Impressionism. She currently lives and works in Edinburgh.

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Marcelle Hanselaar

I never set out to be an artist but I ended up as one. I am always amused that there is this idea that being an artist is the sum total of one’s being. It isn’t. But you have to be driven.

For many years I found it scary to express my feelings, I was afraid to be ridiculed. However, when I started to draw I did not consider at all what the response would be. I would create stories and characters who, like puppets in a theatre, played out all that bothered me.

My images are informed by personal experiences, indignation at social injustice and a feminist rebellion against toeing the line of social behaviour that expects us to be untrue to ourselves. I mainly rebel through images. It is a very potent way of opening up a dialogue and stirring up the dust that was swept under the carpet.

Fortunately, I am both an oil painter and an etcher which means when I run out of steam in one medium I can switch to the other. There is also a strong cross-pollination of ideas and technical overlapping between the two media. For instance, I use many grounds in etching to create a painterly tonality, and with painting, I sometimes scratch into the paint to create highlights or texture.

 

 

There are times when I creatively flatline and one of the ways to get back in the swing is to play. I will recycle old work and re-assemble the scraps into collages. Often I use discarded stuff like cut-up old print proofs and draw or paint on them. It is very freeing to mess about like that because it awakens the playful aspect of creativity without worrying about a specific result.

The main reason why I keep painting and etching is that I like to rise to the challenge of stepping outside my comfort zone of what I know and how to make that work. When that challenge has gone, which it inevitably will be, then I can happily switch to another medium. Or just take a break and do nothing. Doing nothing is a very important part of creativity.

 

About Marcelle Hanselaar

Marcelle Hanselaar is a painter and printmaker whose work explores what it means to be a human, with raw desires and secret fantasies, existing in a civil society. She lives and works in London.

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Molly Lemon

I often wonder how people process their emotions without creating art. I guess we’re all built differently but I know I’d find life a lot harder without the means to create. As a wood engraver, I find engraving very meditative, it focuses my mind and slows my thoughts.

 

 

I have OCD and generalised anxiety which means my brain is often very busy and I tend to ruminate a lot on fears I hold of the future. In my experience, to interrupt that intense anxiety I need to find something else to focus on. Sometimes engraving inside just isn’t enough so I head outside with my dog Winnie and my portable Pooki Press to engrave and print en plein air. When I’m creating as the wind blows my hair around, with pieces of paper threatening to fly away (I’ve lost half an edition to the Mawddach Estuary before), and focusing on completing the print before the sun goes down, there’s just no space left to think about tomorrow’s worries.

 

 

In addition, I find being in nature gives me perspective, looking up at tall trees and over vast rural landscapes helps me to realise my anxieties aren’t as big as I’d feared. For anyone struggling with their mental health, I’d recommend grabbing some art materials (it doesn’t really matter which ones) and just heading outside to create, the windier the day the better, fighting with the elements will help you feel far more present and alive. Also remember to focus on the process rather than the end result, if you return home with a watercolour completely soaked by the rain (I like to think of it as a collaboration with nature) at least you had an interesting experience creating it and you probably learnt something too.

 

 

About Molly Lemon

Molly Lemon is a wood engraver, collage artist, and painter who finds inspiration in the great outdoors. She is co-host of the podcast Out of Ink, where she discusses the highs and lows of life as an artist with illustrator Bea Baranowska. Molly lives and works in Gloucestershire.

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Tim Benson

My artistic practice and my mental health are inextricably linked; as a creative, I feel rudderless if I’m unable to paint for more than a few days. It has been this way to a lesser or greater extent since my early twenties. Soon after leaving art school, I started to suffer from anxiety and panic attacks, I think in no small part a consequence of the uncertain path in life that I had chosen to walk. It was this path that was something of a “curate’s egg”, the problem and the solution. Painting was both a source of uncertainty but also a source of deep satisfaction, the only place that offered me the sanctuary of mindlessness and total immersion. Thankfully my mental health has improved over the years as my place in the world has become less precarious. However I still have the occasional wobble, and I find that immersing myself in a painting continues to offer me the headspace to filter out the noise that life sometimes throws at you.

 

 

About Tim Benson

Tim Benson is an oil painter who primarily paints portraits, figures, and plein air landscapes. He is a past president of the Royal Society of Oil Painters. He lives and works in London.

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Tom Croft

All the proof I needed to confirm art’s power to positively impact mental health came during the pandemic in 2022. At a point where we all feared for our physical health and that of our loved ones, I questioned the point of making art at all. However, when I reflected on the fact that my artistic discipline of portraiture celebrates and records people for generations to come, it felt like the perfect opportunity to document and thank the heroic work of the NHS workers at that horrifically challenging time.

The knock-on effect on my mental state was to feel positive about producing something of worth, but also the process of producing a painting totally consumed my thoughts, drowning out concerns and worries, and helping me focus entirely on my pursuit of the descriptive mark. Making art is complete mindfulness for me and lots of other artists I’ve spoken to. The ability to instantly transport your mind through art to another place, emotion, and time is transformative.

On a personal note, I find concentration and focus a huge challenge for me on most tasks as I have ADHD, but when making artwork I can spend hours entirely absorbed as each mark, tone, and colour is slightly different from the one before and therefore hugely stimulating. The vibration of bright colours next to each other gives me a big dopamine hit, so I’m incredibly lucky that my profession is also my ideal medication.

As a tip, I really look for colours in skin when I’m painting a face. Say I notice a green in a highlight or a purple in a shadow, however subtle it appears, I then try to exaggerate that observation back to the viewer so they can see what I see. So turn up the colour. Amping up saturation is hugely enjoyable and rewarding to my ADHD brain and you can achieve this by not over-mixing your colours. The more you mix and blend your colours the duller they become.

In the portrait, you can hopefully see the higher chroma areas of the skin. As long as the tonal values are correct it will still work and create the right form.

 

 

About Tom Croft

Tom Croft is a portraitist who lives and works in Oxford. He is a member of the Contemporary British Portrait Painters group, and in 2021 received a British Empire Medal for services to the Arts, as a result of founding the Portraits for NHS Heroes initiative during the Covid pandemic. He is currently accepting commissions.

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George J. Harding

I started plein air painting during the pandemic as I found it a good way to channel energy in a positive way, bringing joy and purpose to my life and was good for my well-being at such a difficult time.

During this period, I also read the book, The Salt Path by Raynor Winn and went on my own journey, funded by the Arts Council after the pandemic, along the South West Coastal Path in the summer of 2021 called The Painted Path.

As someone who suffers from mental illness, I wanted to see if a journey like this would alleviate symptoms and make me feel well, as well as inspire and improve my painting knowledge and skills. It did. I felt a sense of purpose when focusing on the activity of painting and hours would fly by when observing the lovely coastal landscapes. I found myself in a meditative state and at ease. As the trip progressed, I became more decisive in the way I painted and through continual application, found a consistent visual language coming to the fore where decisions would be more intuitive and certain.

 

 

I have continued what I learnt from the trip and the skills are now part of my practice. After work and life chores, I find when I go out painting it is a release and pleasure. It is a sketch and doesn’t matter what it is like as a finished piece. It is for me and my joy and is experiential about observing and reacting to that. I don’t want it to be academic and I don’t want to replicate nature. I have a time window, any less it won’t be good and anymore I will ruin it, so a lot is knowing when you are tiring and when you are energetic and in flow.

I want my colours to be intuitive and subjective in the light which wouldn’t be the same from a photo and are unique to the way I see. When there is learning in the paintings I feel they are more interesting than if they were resolved. The paintings are human and of the place I am experiencing. I do work on the landscape in the studio at times because I like adding details later such as people eating a picnic. But being there in nature has to have a speed and immediacy of application because the light of that time and place passes quickly, so your intuition guides you when painting and is an immediate response that you couldn’t replicate. Some are good, some are bad, but it is an activity that takes you out of yourself into the world and this is why it is good for me and my well-being. You then find that whenever you walk around you experience the world differently because you are constantly amazed by what you see and wonder how you could translate it, and looking becomes more of a joy.

 

 

About George J. Harding

George Harding is a Bristol-based painter. His practice has become increasingly focused on plein air landscape painting. He recently made a short film about the benefits of plein air painting to his mental health.

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David Youds

I would say my art is fundamental in regards to maintaining a healthy mindset. It gives me focus and a purpose that I only get while painting. Don’t get me wrong, being an artist certainly comes with its pitfalls. It almost comes with the territory as many creatives undoubtedly have times of inactivity and struggle. It is important to recognise this is only temporary and when the creative juices start to flow again go with it.

Sketching in oils is a useful skill that I find beneficial and enjoyable to my practice. This can be done as a warm-up or simply as part of your finished work and helps develop your painting skills. It can be instantly rewarding and can lead to some exciting results.

As a way of accessing these benefits, set yourself 10-15 minutes to get down as much information in paint as you can. This can be done on card, paper, board, or a sketchbook. Once the time is up, call it finished.

 

 

About David Youds

David is a contemporary British Landscape painter based in Lancashire. His work derives from a love of the French impressionists, largely because of their direct approach to painting. Much like the Impressionists, David’s work often focuses on capturing the subject under various lighting conditions and at different times of the day.

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Further Reading

A Guide to Drawing in Galleries and Museums

Recreating the Colour Palette of John Constable

Exploring the Impact of the Victorian Colour Revolution

The Best Way to Transfer Images to Lino

 

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