Painting or plastic arts help improve human well-being and mental health: from stress, anxiety, depression to the most serious mental illnesses.
When the Civil War broke out in Spain in 1936, the authorities in Madrid, Murcia, Barcelona, Cuenca or Albacete removed the boys and girls from the traumatic experience of the conflict by sending them to colonies of the Ministry of Education of the Spanish Republic. There they tried to lead a normal life, oblivious to what was taking place in the rest of the country: they played, learned and drew, although separated from their families. The drawings made by the minors revealed their life before the outbreak of the war, their stay in these centers and the war scenes that many witnessed. The art therapist Ana Hernandez was one of the researchers helped rescue and document all these illustrations: “Supply a sheet of paper and some colored pencils to the children, It is one of the best medicines for mental painas well as valuable testimony,” he claimed at the time.
Today the American Art Therapy Association (ATAA) defines this discipline as a profession that integrates mental health and human services that seeks to enrich people’s lives, families, and communities through active art-making, the creative process, applied psychological theory, and human experience within a psychotherapeutic relationship. “As the definition indicates, the arts are beneficial to improve human well-being and mental health, understood in a broad sense, from stress, anxiety, depression or more serious mental illness. It has the ability to organize in a new harmony what remains destabilized in the human psyche”, he explains Marian López Fernández-Caoprofessor and art therapist at the Complutense University.
In November 2019, the World Health Organization (WHO) published a report Over the benefits of art on health and well-being. The document points out how the arts can support the development of people, encourage behaviors that promote health and contribute to care. It points out fundamental aspects for human development such as aesthetic commitment, the participation of the imagination, sensory activation, the evocation of emotion, cognitive stimulation or social interaction. And it includes psychological benefits (increased self-esteem, coping and emotional regulation); physiological (lowered stress hormone response, improved immune function, and increased cardiovascular reactivity); social (reduced loneliness and isolation, increased social support); or behavioral (body awareness and regulation, strengthening of a creative personality, adoption of more bonding behaviors, development of abilities).
The educator and scientist regina lake published in 1940 the work ‘The war through children’s drawings’. “This text is key because it is the first that raises the drawing of minors as a way of evaluating traumas to help us understand the assimilation and psychic integration of facts. Drawing has the ability to elaborate, structure and formally organize what is internally disorganized”, explains López Fernández-Cao. Of the 1,872 drawings collected, Lago analyzed 624 corresponding to minors between 6 and 14 years of age. In them he studied pain, absence, mourning and the integration of all this in everyday life. This document is the first to reflect on the structuring power of drawing and its benefits in child victims of traumatic events such as wars.
López Fernández-Cao explains that this creation process is carried out in a safe space and with the professional accompaniment of minors, who “have the ability to externalize internal aspects that may be disorganized, help to structure them visually —visual languages, like all languages, provide structure as well as communication—and to integrate them again”. That’s why they are recommended as support in those processes where the person needs to rediscover or understand what is happening around them. For example, in those traumatic processes, where the word does not arrive or is not enough, art is lighter, less invasive and “connects the two cerebral hemispheres where emotional memory connects with speech.”
Work from the BBVA Collection exhibited at the Cruces de Barakaldo University Hospital – BBVA
From a clinical point of view, art therapy arises in Spain from the practice of experiential learning in medical and psychiatric hospitals. One of the first research methods involved looking at art made by patients with mental illness. The first articles published in Spain relating the painting of people with this type of pathology to modern art were by the neurologist and psychiatrist Gonzalo R. Lafora between 1915 and 1922, contributing to the incipient literature on psychiatry and art therapy in Spain, according to the magazine de History of Psychology. In Europe there is the important consortium GAPthe European Consortium of Arts Therapies Education, which brings together 34 universities that offer art therapy at the university level.
Since the beginning of the year, BBVA has promoted, in collaboration with the Foundation [H]arte, an art therapy initiative with the ‘Through the window’ exhibition at the Cruces de Barakaldo University Hospital. The sample consists of 24 engravings from the funds of the financial institution, linked to a playlist of songs by means of a QR code, by artists of the 20th century from the BBVA Collection such as Amalia Avia, Juan Navarro Baldeweg or Riera and Arago. “Following the WHO recommendations of include art and culture in health systemswe are convinced that art contributes to the well-being of health workers and patients”, explains Maria Luisa Barrio, responsible for Artistic Heritage and Historical Archive of the bank. “The therapeutic power of plastic arts and music has a huge impact on people,” she concludes.
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