The ability to be creative and engage in any type of art is an important aspect in reducing stress and increasing well-being. It is also one of the most cost effective, non-invasive, as well as a non-pharmacological technique in reducing negative mental health symptoms.
Participating in creative activities helps people cope with stress and despair and alleviate the burden of chronic mental illnesses [7]. Cultures all over the world consider artistic expression an important aspect of the healing process. Throughout history, people have used paintings, storytelling, dances, yoga, and chants as healing rituals [7,34,35]. Over the last decade, health psychologists have carefully examined how art therapy help heal emotional traumas, enhance awareness of oneself and others, establish self-reflection capacity, reduce mental manifestations, and transform behaviours and way of thinking.
I’ve seen the positive effects of engaging in art therapy firsthand while studying transpersonal art therapy. It’s helped me so much in managing my own anxiety, I hope others who are seeking support can experience it themselves. These are a few quotes I’ve come across that describe how incredible the field of Art Therapy truly is.
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“Expressive art therapy integrates all of the arts in a safe, non-judgmental setting to facilitate personal growth and healing. To use the arts expressively means going into our inner realms to discover feelings and to express them through visual art, movement, sound, writing or drama. This process fosters release, self-understanding, insight and awakens creativity and transpersonal states of consciousness.”
– Natalie Rogers⋆
“It’s not about being good at creativity, it’s about creativity being good for you.”
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“Something is always born of excess: great art was born of great terrors, great loneliness, great inhibitions, instabilities, and it always balances them.”
– Anais Nin⋆
“Art washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life.”
– Pablo Picasso⋆
“Art enables us to find ourselves and lose ourselves at the same time.”
– Thomas Merton
“At the deepest level, the creative process and the healing process arise from a single source. When you are an artist, you are a healer; a wordless trust of the same mystery is the foundation of your work and its integrity.”
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“Art speaks where words are unable to explain.”
– Pam Holland⋆
“Painting from nature is not copying the object; it is realising one’s sensations.”
– Paul Cézanne⋆
“I applied streaks and blobs of colours onto the canvas with a palette knife, and I made them sing with all the intensity I could…”
– Wassily Kandinsky⋆
“I could say things with color and shape that I couldn’t’ say any other way – things I had no words for…”
– Margaret Naumburg⋆
“Art is the activity by which a person, having experienced an emotion, intentionally transmits it to others.”
– Leo Tolstoy
“Every artist dips his brush in his own soul, and paints his own nature into his pictures.”
– Henry Ward Beecher⋆
“Great art picks up where nature ends.”
– Marc Chagall⋆
“I found I could say things with colour and shapes that I couldn’t say any other way – things I had no words for.”
– Georgia O’Keefe⋆
“If you hear a voice within you say “you cannot paint,” then by all means paint, and that voice will be silenced.”
– Vincent Van Gogh⋆
“If an art installation gets a patient out of his room or paintings take a person’s mind off their pain and lower their stress levels, the art isn’t just decorative anymore. It’s part of the entire model of care.”
– Dr. Lisa Harris
“The art of healing comes from nature, not from the physician. Therefore the physician must start from nature, with an open mind.”
– Paracelsus⋆
“Art can permeate the very deepest part of us, where no words exist.”
― Eileen Miller⋆
“Art is my cure to all this madness, sadness and loss of belonging in the world & through it I’ll walk myself home.”
― Nikki Rowe⋆
“Creating artwork allows your mind to be in a safe place while it contemplates the tougher issues you are dealing with. One can use the tools of brush, paint, pastels, crayons etc to expose and even for a short time color those issues in a different light.”
― George E. Miller⋆
“I should advise you to put it all down as beautifully & as carefully as you can—in some beautifully bound book. It will seem as if you were making the visions banal—but then you need to do that—then you are freed from the power of them. . . . Then when these things are in some precious book you can go to the book & turn over the pages & for you it will be your church—your cathedral—the silent places of your spirit where you will find renewal. If anyone tells you that it is morbid or neurotic and you listen to them—then you will lose your soul—for in that book is your soul.”
― Carl Jung⋆
“Life is full of challenges. We all have them. Art has helped me through my own deep valleys.”
― Sarah Jio
Want to try art therapy?
My name is Kimberly Hetherington and I’m a certified transpersonal art therapist and meditation teacher.
Contact me at therapywithkimberly@gmail.com or follow me on:
Art Therapy with Kimberly 
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I absolutely love these art quotes. They’re so inspiring & really capture the healing power of art. One of my favorite quotes that I think would fit perfectly here is by Vincent van Gogh, ‘I am seeking, I am striving, I am in it with all my heart.’ It speaks to the passion and dedication that art can bring to our lives.
Thank you! I love that quote too and agree completely!