In my years in the classroom, I have had the pleasure of teaching several children who have either one or two artists as parents. These children, who have a higher than average exposure to art and the media for creating it, possess some qualities that many other children do not have: in addition to their artistic talent, I have observed that they usually read and write better than their peers. My conclusion is that their exposure to art affects other aspects of their learning. This led me to a discussion with Aiko Cuneo, an artist who works with children in public schools, to hash out the benefits of arts education, both in and out of schools.
We suggest that parents expand their definition of art. If you are a baker or a cook, if you like to arrange flowers, if you enjoy the harmonious arrangement of objects in your home, you are an artist. These expressions of creativity are as legitimate and valuable as those of painters and the other people we call artists. If you are a scientist and enjoy inventing and experimenting, you bring an artistic sensibility to your work and may include yourself in the definition of artist.
Art is a delightful way through which you can record the development of your child’s growth. Just as you will notice that writing and reading improves with age, so does artwork. The role of parents and teachers is to expose children to a variety of materials so that they can create art. Once the variety is offered, children will then have a choice as to whether they want to use the materials or not. But without the exposure, there is no choice.
Creating art is a fine way for children to make choices and solve problems. Every step involves making a decision: what color to use, how to make a line, what size to make something. With every choice the object becomes more and more their own.
Everyone has an imagination. Art takes it a step further. Through art, children create something that, until that point, was only imagined. Thus, they create visual manifestations of abstract ideas.
Children who may be having difficulties in other parts of the school curriculum may find an expressive outlet through art. It’s a way to uncover talent that may not be seen otherwise. Art is a means of communicating ideas, feelings, and solutions in a way other than verbally or written
In a ten-year national study by Shirley Brice Heath of Stanford University, it was discovered that young people who are involved in highly effective non-school arts-based community programs in under-resourced communities, in comparison with a national sample of students were:
Four times more likely to win an academic award, such as being on the honor roll.
Eight times more likely to receive a community service award.
Three times more likely to win a school attendance award.
Four times more likely to participate in a math or science fair.
Likely to score higher on their SAT college admission test scores if they have been involved for more than four years of after-school arts study.
It is typical that those who fund school programs have seen the visual and performing arts as frills — programs that can be added only when there is enough money for them, as well as the first to be cut if there is a budget crisis.
Families can create a harmonious balance in their children’s lives when they make provisions for the arts. Following are ideas to incorporate them into your home life.
When you read to your children, be dramatic. Act out stories with props and costumes. Encourage them to create their own stories to act out for you.
Save old Halloween costumes for dress-up fun. Add to the collection with clothing you no longer need: hats, scarves, purses, shoes, and items you can find inexpensively at garage sales.
Put together an “art studio” in your home. Stock it with a variety of tools and materials: crayons, markers, finger paints, scissors, pastels, watercolors, brushes, glues, papers of various sizes and textures, intriguing found objects, leftovers from your own home improvement, boxes and containers of all sizes.
Expand your musical repertoire at home and in the car. Venture into unknown musical territory so that you and the children can hear something out of your usual fare. This can be easily expanded by turning to different radio stations and by checking out cassettes and CDs from the public library — all for free!
While the music is playing at home, dance together. Teach your children traditional dances you know or improvise with them. Body movement is fun and good exercise.
Sing together. Teach the kids your favorite songs. Many of them allow for verses that can be made up, such as “Down by the Bay,” which can have an endless and hilarious number of rhymes added to it.
Look for arts programs after school, on weekends, and during vacations. Many community park and recreation departments offer these. Summer camps based on the arts are a good departure from the typical competitive sports camps.
Create a scrapbook together. Put photos, memorabilia, drawings, and captions together creatively. In doing so, you will not only have a shared experience but a memory that will last for many years (if you use acid-free paper).
The most important ingredient in the recipe is your interest. Be there to appreciate and encourage during every step of the creative process.
This article has been incorporated and expanded in Teach Your Children Well: A Teacher’s Advice for Parents. This article is reprinted with the author’s permission.
Friday 8 September 2017
Laurie Anderson Interview: Advice to the Young
“Be loose!” The legendary multimedia artist, musician and film director Laurie Anderson puts it as simply and clearly as that when she here advises artists to avoid being pressured into limiting themselves artistically.
Calling yourself something as “vague” as a multimedia artist – as Anderson does – gives you the freedom to do whatever you want, without having to worry about whether it fits a certain definition: “It’s so easy to get pigeonholed in the art world.” Anderson is aware that sales are a strong underlying factor – “I am a 21st century citizen in a highly corporate world” – but she nonetheless maintains that you should always follow your own interest and obsession: “Whatever makes you feel free and really good – that’s what to do. It’s really simple.”
Laurie Anderson (b. 1947) is an internationally renowned experimental performance artist, composer, musician and film director, based in New York. Initially trained as a sculptor, Anderson became widely known outside the art world with her single ‘O Superman’, which reached number two in the UK pop charts in 1981. She is considered a pioneer of electronic music and is praised for her unique spoken word albums and multimedia art pieces. Among her most recent work is the film ‘Heart of a Dog’ (2015). For more about Anderson see: laurieanderson.com/
Laurie Anderson was interviewed by Christian Lund at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Denmark in May 2016.
“When we have learned how to listen to trees, then the brevity and the quickness and the childlike hastiness of our thoughts achieve an incomparable joy.”
I woke up this morning to discover a tiny birch tree rising amidst my city quasi-garden, having overcome unthinkable odds to float its seed over heaps of concrete and glass, and begin a life in a meager oasis of soil. And I thought, my god, what a miracle. What magic. What a reminder that life does not await permission to be lived.
This little wonder reminded me of a beautiful passage, perhaps one of the most beautiful passages I’ve ever read, from Hermann Hesse’s Bäume: Betrachtungen und Gedichte [Trees: Reflections and Poems] , originally published in 1984, that touches on some of life’s most essential livingness — home and belonging, truth and beauty, happiness.
For me, trees have always been the most penetrating preachers. I revere them when they live in tribes and families, in forests and groves. And even more I revere them when they stand alone. They are like lonely persons. Not like hermits who have stolen away out of some weakness, but like great, solitary men, like Beethoven and Nietzsche. In their highest boughs the world rustles, their roots rest in infinity; but they do not lose themselves there, they struggle with all the force of their lives for one thing only: to fulfill themselves according to their own laws, to build up their own form, to represent themselves. Nothing is holier, nothing is more exemplary than a beautiful, strong tree. When a tree is cut down and reveals its naked death-wound to the sun, one can read its whole history in the luminous, inscribed disk of its trunk: in the rings of its years, its scars, all the struggle, all the suffering, all the sickness, all the happiness and prosperity stand truly written, the narrow years and the luxurious years, the attacks withstood, the storms endured. And every young farmboy knows that the hardest and noblest wood has the narrowest rings, that high on the mountains and in continuing danger the most indestructible, the strongest, the ideal trees grow.
Trees are sanctuaries. Whoever knows how to speak to them, whoever knows how to listen to them, can learn the truth. They do not preach learning and precepts, they preach, undeterred by particulars, the ancient law of life.
A tree says: A kernel is hidden in me, a spark, a thought, I am life from eternal life. The attempt and the risk that the eternal mother took with me is unique, unique the form and veins of my skin, unique the smallest play of leaves in my branches and the smallest scar on my bark. I was made to form and reveal the eternal in my smallest special detail.
A tree says: My strength is trust. I know nothing about my fathers, I know nothing about the thousand children that every year spring out of me. I live out the secret of my seed to the very end, and I care for nothing else. I trust that God is in me. I trust that my labor is holy. Out of this trust I live.
When we are stricken and cannot bear our lives any longer, then a tree has something to say to us: Be still! Be still! Look at me! Life is not easy, life is not difficult. Those are childish thoughts. . . . Home is neither here nor there. Home is within you, or home is nowhere at all.
A longing to wander tears my heart when I hear trees rustling in the wind at evening. If one listens to them silently for a long time, this longing reveals its kernel, its meaning. It is not so much a matter of escaping from one’s suffering, though it may seem to be so. It is a longing for home, for a memory of the mother, for new metaphors for life. It leads home. Every path leads homeward, every step is birth, every step is death, every grave is mother.
So the tree rustles in the evening, when we stand uneasy before our own childish thoughts: Trees have long thoughts, long-breathing and restful, just as they have longer lives than ours. They are wiser than we are, as long as we do not listen to them. But when we have learned how to listen to trees, then the brevity and the quickness and the childlike hastiness of our thoughts achieve an incomparable joy. Whoever has learned how to listen to trees no longer wants to be a tree. He wants to be nothing except what he is. That is home. That is happiness.
In 2010, the American Journal of Public Health published a review titled, The Connection Between Art, Healing, and Public Health. You can find it here.
In that article, researchers analyzed more than 100 studies about the impact of art on your health and your ability to heal yourself. The studies included everything from music and writing to dance and the visual arts.
As an example, here are the findings from five visual arts studies mentioned in that review (visual arts includes things like painting, drawing, photography, pottery, and textiles). Each study examined more than 30 patients who were battling chronic illness and cancer.
Here’s how the researchers described the impact that visual art activities had on the patients…
“Art filled occupational voids, distracted thoughts of illness”
“Improved well–being by decreasing negative emotions and increasing positive ones”
“Improved medical outcomes, trends toward reduced depression”
“Reductions in stress and anxiety; increases in positive emotions”
“Reductions in distress and negative emotions”
“Improvements in flow and spontaneity, expression of grief, positive identity, and social networks”
I don’t know about you, but I think the benefits listed above sound like they would be great not just for patients in hospitals, but for everyone. Who wouldn’t want to reduce stress and anxiety, increase positive emotions, and reduce the likelihood of depression?
Furthermore, the benefits of art aren’t merely “in your head.”
The impact of art, music, and writing can be seen in your physical body as well. In fact, this study published in the Journal of Psychosomatic Medicine used writing as a treatment for HIV patients found that writing resulted in “improvements of CD4+ lymphocyte counts.”
That’s the fancy way of saying: the act of writing actually impacted the cells inside the patient’s body and improved their immune system.
In other words, the process of creating art doesn’t just make you feel better, it also creates real, physical changes inside your body.
Create More Than You Consume
The moral of this story is that the process of making art — whether that be writing, painting, singing, dancing, or anything in between — is good for you.
There are both physical and mental benefits from creating art, expressing yourself in a tangible way, and sharing something with the world. I’m trying to do more of it each week, and I’d encourage you to do the same.
In our always–on, always–connected world of television, social media, and on–demand everything, it can be stupidly easy to spend your entire day consuming information and simply responding to all of the inputs that bombard your life.
Art offers an outlet and a release from all of that. Take a minute to ignore all of the incoming signals and create an outgoing one instead. Produce something. Express yourself in some way. As long as you contribute rather than consume, anything you do can be a work of art.
Open a blank document and start typing. Put pen to paper and sketch a drawing. Grab your camera and take a picture. Turn up the music and dance. Start a conversation and make it a good one.
Build something. Share something. Craft something. Make more art. Your health and happiness will improve and we’ll all be better off for it.
Arts
and creativity are essential elements in our life and I believe everyone should
consider it seriously. Have you ever seen even one person who has never
had this itching desire to create something, to draw or paint, to sing, to
dance, to paly an instrument, to write a poem, a story or to make a craft? I’ve
never seen even one person who has no yearning for art making but I have seen
many fearful people afraid of talking or even thinking about arts. Many blocked
artists think they are not talented enough, not having enough time, too old to
start, have too many responsibilities, or those who reject art-making even more
harshly, believing arts gets you no where, or it’s just wasting time.
Limiting beliefs, fear of failure and rejection make us to restrain our imagination and ignoring our inner artist and our
deep desire to create.
Since
2015 I’ve been running Art workshops called Art-Empowers for general participants encouraging
everyone to create freely and experience the benefit of the craft. The aim is
to empower people through Art and bringing awareness to mental health and
wellbeing. Through different practice including interactive theater games,
story telling, drawing and digital media everyone has the opportunity to
discover inner talent while enjoying the creative process.
“Inside you there’s an artist you don’t know about… say yes quickly, if you know, if you’ve known it from before the beginning of the universe.” Rumi
Dr
Christina Davis discuss her recent research the Art of Being Mentally Healthy
“Do you relax by playing a musical instrument,
reading a novel, singing or painting? Have your mind and body ‘worked out’
while dancing? Do you delight in a good concert, play, movie or exhibition?
Stop and think about how these behaviours affect your mental wellbeing. With an
emphasis on enjoyment, relaxation, social inclusion and the ability to improve
resilience, confidence and self-esteem, an arts-mental health paradigm has the
potential to deliver major public health benefits.
The Art of Being
Mentally Healthy was recently published in BMC Public Health.
The award-winning study is the first internationally to quantify the
arts-mental health relationship and provides evidence of an association between
mental wellbeing and 2 hours per week of arts engagement in the general
population.
For the purpose of the study, ‘Arts engagement’ was
defined as the art people do as part of their everyday lives for enjoyment,
entertainment or as a hobby (i.e. recreational arts rather than art therapy).
A random sample of 702 Western Australian adults
aged 18+ years were invited to take part in the study via telephone survey
(response= 71%). The survey took 15 minutes to complete and included questions
about mental well-being and arts engagement over the previous 12 months.
After adjustment for age, gender, location, income,
education, marital status, children, general health, sports engagement,
religious activities and holidays, results showed that:
•people with 100 or more hours
per year of arts engagement (i.e. at least 2hrs per week) had significantly
better mental wellbeing than those with none or lower levels of
engagement.
•The relationship between arts
engagement and mental wellbeing was nonlinear with evidence of a minimum
threshold at 100 or more hours per year (i.e. at least 2hrs/week).
This is the first study to quantify the
relationship between recreational arts engagement and mental health in a
general population.
The quantification of the arts-mental health is
relationship is of value to:
1artists, health professionals,
clinicians and researchers interested in utilising the arts as a method for improving
mental health in the general population;
2artists, health promoters,
policy makers, arts organisations and health organisations in the development
of population based health messages, policy and practice; and
3members of the general public
in maintaining or improving their own wellbeing.
Arts activities and events have the potential to
contribute to health promotion strategies and have implications for innovative
public health policy and practice.
A good story can make or break a presentation, article, or conversation. But why is that? Here I would like to share the science of why storytelling is so uniquely powerful.
In 1748, the British politician and aristocrat John Montagu, the 4th Earl of Sandwich, spent a lot of his free time playing cards. He greatly enjoyed eating a snack while still keeping one hand free for the cards. So he came up with the idea to eat beef between slices of toast, which would allow him to finally eat and play cards at the same time. Eating his newly invented "sandwich," the name for two slices of bread with meat in between, became one of the most popular meal inventions in the western world.
What's interesting about this is that you are very likely to never forget the story of who invented the sandwich ever again. Or at least, much less likely to do so, if it would have been presented to us in bullet points or other purely information-based form.
For over 27,000 years, since the first cave paintings were discovered, telling stories has been one of our most fundamental communication methods. Recently a good friend of mine gave me an introduction to the power of storytelling, and I wanted to learn more.
Here is the science around storytelling and how we can use it to make better decisions every day:
Our brain on stories: How our brains become more active when we tell stories
We all enjoy a good story, whether it's a novel, a movie, or simply something one of our friends is explaining to us. But why do we feel so much more engaged when we hear a narrative about events?
It's in fact quite simple. If we listen to a powerpoint presentation with boring bullet points, a certain part in the brain gets activated. Scientists call this Broca's area and Wernicke's area. Overall, it hits our language processing parts in the brain, where we decode words into meaning. And that's it, nothing else happens.
When we are being told a story, things change dramatically. Not only are the language processing parts in our brain activated, but any other area in our brain that we would use when experiencing the events of the story are too.
If someone tells us about how delicious certain foods were, our sensory cortex lights up. If it's about motion, our motor cortex gets active:
"Metaphors like "The singer had a velvet voice" and "He had leathery hands" roused the sensory cortex. […] Then, the brains of participants were scanned as they read sentences like "John grasped the object" and "Pablo kicked the ball." The scans revealed activity in the motor cortex, which coordinates the body's movements."
A story can put your whole brain to work. And yet, it gets better:
When we tell stories to others that have really helped us shape our thinking and way of life, we can have the same effect on them too. The brains of the person telling a story and listening to it can synchronize, says Uri Hasson from Princeton:
"When the woman spoke English, the volunteers understood her story, and their brains synchronized. When she had activity in her insula, an emotional brain region, the listeners did too. When her frontal cortex lit up, so did theirs. By simply telling a story, the woman could plant ideas, thoughts and emotions into the listeners' brains."
Anything you've experienced, you can get others to experience the same. Or at least, get their brain areas that you've activated that way, active too:
Evolution has wired our brains for storytelling—how to make use of it
Now all this is interesting. We know that we can activate our brains better if we listen to stories. The still unanswered question is: Why is that? Why does the format of a story, where events unfold one after the other, have such a profound impact on our learning?
The simple answer is this: We are wired that way. A story, if broken down into the simplest form, is a connection of cause and effect. And that is exactly how we think. We think in narratives all day long, no matter if it is about buying groceries, whether we think about work or our spouse at home. We make up (short) stories in our heads for every action and conversation. In fact, Jeremy Hsu found [that] "personal stories and gossip make up 65% of our conversations."
Now, whenever we hear a story, we want to relate it to one of our existing experiences. That's why metaphors work so well with us. While we are busy searching for a similar experience in our brains, we activate a part called insula, which helps us relate to that same experience of pain, joy, or disgust.
The following graphic probably describes it best:
In a great experiment, John Bargh at Yale found the following:
"Volunteers would meet one of the experimenters, believing that they would be starting the experiment shortly. In reality, the experiment began when the experimenter, seemingly struggling with an armful of folders, asks the volunteer to briefly hold their coffee. As the key experimental manipulation, the coffee was either hot or iced. Subjects then read a description of some individual, and those who had held the warmer cup tended to rate the individual as having a warmer personality, with no change in ratings of other attributes."
We link up metaphors and literal happenings automatically. Everything in our brain is looking for the cause and effect relationship of something we've previously experienced.
Let's dig into some hands on tips to make use of it:
Exchange giving suggestions for telling stories
Do you know the feeling when a good friend tells you a story and then two weeks later, you mention the same story to him, as if it was your idea? This is totally normal and at the same time, one of the most powerful ways to get people on board with your ideas and thoughts. According to Uri Hasson from Princeton, a story is the only way to activate parts in the brain so that a listener turns the story into their own idea and experience.
The next time you struggle with getting people on board with your projects and ideas, simply tell them a story, where the outcome is that doing what you had in mind is the best thing to do. According to Princeton researcher Hasson, storytelling is the only way to plant ideas into other people's minds.
Write more persuasively—bring in stories from yourself or an expert
This is something that took me a long time to understand. If you start out writing, it's only natural to think "I don't have a lot of experience with this, how can I make my post believable if I use personal stories?" The best way to get around this is by simply exchanging stories with those of experts. When this blog used to be a social media blog, I would ask for quotes from the top folks in the industry or simply find great passages they had written online. It's a great way to add credibility and at the same time, tell a story.
The simple story is more successful than the complicated one
When we think of stories, it is often easy to convince ourselves that they have to be complex and detailed to be interesting. The truth is however, that the simpler a story, the more likely it will stick. Using simple language as well as low complexity is the best way to activate the brain regions that make us truly relate to the happenings of a story. This is a similar reason why multitasking is so hard for us. Try for example to reduce the number of adjectives or complicated nouns in a presentation or article and exchange them with more simple, yet heartfelt language.
Quick last fact: Our brain learns to ignore certain overused words and phrases that used to make stories awesome. Scientists, in the midst of researching the topic of storytelling have also discovered, that certain words and phrases have lost all storytelling power:
"Some scientists have contended that figures of speech like "a rough day" are so familiar that they are treated simply as words and no more."
This means, that the frontal cortex—the area of your brain responsible to experience emotions—can't be activated with these phrases. It's something that might be worth remembering when crafting your next story.
Writer Lisa Unger has expressed a very positive attitude about it: “I live for the blank page.” With 14 novels, she certainly has the experience.
But what if you feel more intimidated and fearful than excited about starting on a creative venture?
Writing anxiety such as writer’s block can be fueled by self-talk and emotional habits such as responding to a blank page the same way you have in the past.
Author and writing coach Christine Kloser, host of The Transformational Author Experience, quotes some of her students about this experience:
“I have general feeling of anxiety when I sit down and open up that blank page.”
“I feel like I can’t keep excitement in my stories.”
“I keep asking myself is this good enough.”
“I don’t think have anything new or valuable to share, although I know my experience has been profound.”
Kloser points out there may be a fear of writing some kinds of material:
“Sometimes what you write will make you cry and a few of you write me about how you have this fear of the emotions that the writing brings up.
“You’re writing about perhaps some clearing some things that had happened in the past that were really painful to go through and the releasing of them on the page for the purpose of serving your reader through those same, narrow paths.”
Preparing for the meeting with the blank page
Kloser thinks there is a value, even necessity, for preparing ourself internally, and thinking of this as a “meeting, and it is a meeting with the blank page when you get there – it is not just, Oh, this is something I have to do…
“Sitting with a blank page is like meeting with a dear friend. It’s like meeting with someone who you love, care about, and who you want the best for.
“When you sit down to the blank page, it is not the cold, stark, distant, scary, vast nothingness. It is a meeting, a meeting of souls, a meeting with a loved one, a meeting with someone you cared about and you have something to communicate to.”
Begin with quiet
She has interviewed some of the bestselling authors in the world, and says, “In my experience most of them, I can’t say all, but I can say a good portion of them begin their writing with quiet first.
“They begin their writing not in the chatter, not in the pressure, not in the fear, not in the self doubt. They begin the writing actually in the quiet, in the question, in the opening to what it is that wants to come through you.”
