Today’s Mood Busting Art
Is it possible to bust through a bad mood with art?
Garden Holiday by Dorothea Sandra, EDAC
As many of you know, we live in “interesting” times. So many people today are stressed or sad or deeply troubled by something or someone. I like to use my art to fight against this by creating credible pieces that bust through these moods and create upward movement feelings of happiness and hope and joy. Using well-researched guidelines, I like to reach inside the brain through art and help shift a negative mood into something positive.
From the 1960s until today, serious researchers with very serious studies…from different countries…from different multidisciplinary fields have converged to create a new field of art called Evidence-based Design. According to the National Library of Medicine at the National Institute of Health, “Evidence-based design is scientific analysis methodology that emphasizes the use of data acquired in order to influence the design process in hospitals. It measures the physical and psychological effects of the built environment on its users.”
Today, evidence-based design isn’t just for hospitals. It’s for all of us. It is for many of the places humans go. What is my role in all of this? A very small one—but I think an important one. Today my art hangs in hospitals, businesses, organizations, and homes. Using my artistic talents and evidence-based design training and certification—just as I did in this triptych art called Happy Garden—I very deliberately and very strategically create happy, happy art for today’s built environments.
People often ask me where I get my inspiration for this style of painting I call Bubble Art. These photos of flowers come from just two of my yards in Northern Michigan. I live in a super clean, healthy environment and inspiration always seems to be all around me—everywhere I seem to look. Nature is a truly powerful healer. When we can’t be out in it, putting art on our walls that captures nature’s fun and beauty often helps.
(I keep 100 percent pesticide-free yards with many bee and butterfly friendly plants. The bees this years are plentiful. I have even seen up to 8-10 bees on one bush.)
In a Garden Holiday, I used my evidence-based knowledge to select the cheerful background color. I painted the flowers in soil to give the artwork a rooted to our life-giving earth feel. Flowers and stems are never similar or boring in nature, so I gave this work an abundance of fun-filled stem twists and turns, pops full of flowery color, and many hints of humor.
If you would like to learn a bit more about evidence-based design and see how I applied it to my art, my new book, 100 Days Of Happy Happy Art, Evidence-Based Design, is available through Amazon.
Bubbling With Happy Smiles
Today’s art to make us smile.
Creating happiness is a gift, and I love to use my artistic talents to help others smile.
Bubbling With Happy Smiles by Dorothea Sandra
What Happens To Our Brains On Art?
The research results are in: according to The Telegraph in the United Kingdom, “Looking at a gorgeous painting, sculpture, or other artwork, increases blood flow to the brain by as much as 10 percent—the equivalent of looking at someone you love.”
According to professor Pierre Lemarquis, the French neuroscientist who wrote L’art Qui Guérit (Art That Heals) “art of all kinds acts on our brains in a multi-faceted, dynamic way. Neural networks are formed to achieve heightened, complex states of connectivity. Art can sculpt and even caress our brains.”
Isn’t This Exciting?
My goal was to create a work of art that would trigger our brains for fun and laughter and smiles. There’s enough reality in the soil to ground the painting, while the stems take off playfully up and down and around and side to side. The colors are bright and cheerful and full of dynamism and diversity.
So many people have told me this piece instantly busts through bad moods and makes them smile inside. Others have said the flowers communicate that one is perfectly beautiful even when super odd or different or not traditionally formed.
So much of my art is influenced by nature’s water movements and flowers. Here is Bubbling With Happy Smiles, as well as other pieces, on display at the Art In The Loft Gallery in Alpena, Michigan.
People often think of small northern towns as boring. This “authentic arts town” busts with summer activities. Festivals, art, music, water activities, cruise ships docking, amazing natural areas, wildlife, and truly friendly and fun (and open minded) people makes Alpena, Michigan a place I spend lots of time visiting. I’m in two galleries there, and I love it!
Here are some photos of one of the marinas and just one of the many colorful side alleys and back parking lots.
In such a fun and friendly “authentic” place, it’s so easy to get inspired to create happy art. Many of the paintings in my book, 100 Days Of Happy Happy Art, Evidence-Based Design, were influenced by this clean, healthy, and super beautiful area.
This book is not a marketing push. (There are no painting prices published.) It is visually pleasing, as well as an informative journey into a new art field based on science and medical studies called Evidence-based Design.