Art and beauty: necessity or luxury?

I'm someone who’s largely affected by my surroundings and the aesthetics around me. There are certain places and settings that can instantly lift my mood and then other places that can do quite the opposite. I've always felt like I was the only one who was sensitive with this and I have in the past shamed myself for it, wondering why I'm being picky and that I shouldn't let it get to me. But I've recently learnt that there is a good reason behind these preferences (yay! Im not a weirdo after all) and I wanted to share it with you.

More and more studies are finding that surroundings which are aesthetically pleasing to us can improve our well-being, behaviour, cognitive function and mood. In 2017 a study was carried out in a hospital to see whether art had an impact on the health of patients. It was found that the presence of visual art contributes to health outcomes by improving patient satisfaction as an extended form of health care. Another hospital that had two wards - an old ward and one which was newly renovated - looked at patients in both. They found that patients in the newly decorated ward needed less pain medication and left earlier than patients recovering in the old ward (errmm wow!!).

Beauty and our surroundings have always been important to us. Beyond individual and contemporary taste some things have never gone out of fashion. Humans are in agreement about certain things being beautiful and they are all rooted in nature. Symmetry is one example of this. It helped our ancestors survive because it was a sign of safety and that things are in order and as they should be (think about our preference for buying symmetrical vegetables for instance). Over the years and as we have developed, we've created our own man-made environment. In this process we often neglected beauty in favor of functionality, cost and efficiency. We've created bland buildings all in rows, but the problem with this is that humans don't like monotony, it can actually make us feel rather low. Besides things like good health and a harmonious family life, individual happiness is affected by how beautiful you find the city you live in. Inhabitants of cities were asked to vote in a poll. The results showed that beauty is considered most important and scored even higher than cleanliness or safety. Humans have been fine tuned for millions of years to process visual input and assess our surroundings, we are simply programmed this way and we are starting to learn more about how much beauty is really influencing us.

I've been thinking about this in the context of our current situation. The pandemic has forced us back into our homes and is making us realise how important the space around us is, and how well it is looking after us and we have started to give it some love in return. Money that would otherwise have been spent dining out is now spent on house plants, cushions and kitchen utensils. Home is no longer a place where we just go to sleep and rest. It's now an office, a gym, a classroom, a studio and everything else in between. So the next time you feel like splashing out on a new painting, changing the colour of your walls or simply lighting a candle to change the ambience of the room, please do it! These things impact us in bigger ways than we think.

I hope you're all looking after yourselves, it really is tough out there.
Merry Christmas everyone and a Happy New Year!


Big love,

S

'The aim of art is not to represent the outward appearance of things, but their inward significance'

-Aristotle

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