The other day I saw an article in the newspaper claiming that art can improve your mental health. It said that we should stand and gaze at a famous piece of art and take in every little detail. Over the years I’ve visited a number of the large art galleries in London and the main outcome was aching feet not reduced stress. Leicester can’t compete with London’s galleries but we do have the New Walk Museum which, in addition to dinosaur skeletons and Egyptian Mummies, has several rooms of artwork. I haven’t been for a while. I really must return and take note of my stress levels before and after the visit.
The article got me wondering about the mental health values of producing my own pieces of art. I’ve been going to weekly art classes at Leicester’s Adult Education Centre for years. I’ve tried all manner of genres, from water colour with pen and ink to experimental painting with acrylics. The most challenging was line drawing using a pen. We weren’t even allowed to sketch out a plan in pencil first – scary! Once I got over the fear of the white page, I found it quite liberating.
This is a pen drawing I did from a photograph. I added water colour touches. Apologies if the lettering is incorrect and, as you can see, the angles are all wrong but once the pen line is made there's no going back:
My favourite genre is pencil sketching. I copied this boot from a book for beginner artists, pencil in one hand and rubber in the other:
On reflection, I’ve decided that producing my own pieces of art does very little for my mental health. It might even make me more stressed as I make too many mistakes. My paintings often end up a mass of muddy brown.
Going back to the newspaper article, it reminded me how much satisfaction I got from the module on ekphrastic writing which was part of my Creative Writing MA. I blogged about it in 2019 and explained how our amazing tutor, Jonathan Taylor, took us to the Museum, told us to find a piece of art that caught our eye and write either about what we saw or how it made us feel. I became fascinated by the German Expressionist Exhibition and have since returned a number of times to that gallery. I wrote a whole raft of poems inspired by those paintings. Most have now been published in some form or another and so I’ve decided that the article is correct. Looking at those paintings in that exhibition helped my mental health in more ways than one. I even got paid for several of those poems.
Below is the link to the page in the Ekphrastic Review with my first published ekphrastic poem called Youth.
