How Art Can Change Your Life

Offering helpful guidance, this illustrated handbook introduces new ways of viewing art and shows how anyone can use art to work through difficult emotions and improve their mental state. 

Enlightening, challenging, and informative, visual art can also be therapeutic, reducing anxiety and stress levels, and offering perspective on the challenges that we all face in our lives. How Art Can Change Your Life introduces readers to new ways of looking at a wide range of art. Through careful examination and explanation, author Susie Hodge investigates how engaging with art and drawing can help everyone feel more connected and inspired.

From Frida Kahlo confronting her anxieties to Henri Matisse embracing happiness, and from Louise Bourgeois conquering fear to Auguste Rodin finding hope, this book will show how you too can use art to work through difficult emotions and improve your mental state. All art can broaden knowledge, give enjoyment, and challenge our assumptions; but it can also help soothe, calm, enlighten, and uplift the mind and spirit. Even art that leaves us uncomfortable can still help us to think differently and give us new perspective.

In twelve chapters, readers will learn how art can dissipate anger, help to overcome sorrow, inspire self-reflection, as well as tackle other mental challenges. Artists have been conveying aspirations, feelings, ideas, and stories for thousands of years, and this book will help everyone “read” those messages with the goal of enriching their own emotional life through art.