Art naturally brings pleasure. Now there is evidence that paintings can also help alleviate medical conditions and encourage NHS staff.
A new book produced by the charity Paintings in Hospitals (PiH), featuring a collection of 3,500 works and prints, including by Andy Warhol, Maggi Hambling and Bridget Riley, in medical settings across the UK, includes feedback from dozens of patients and medical professionals. staff about the “invaluable” benefits of seeing the art. Hospitals, health centres, operating theaters and hospices can borrow the charity’s paintings for display, usually for two or three years.
In the book, Lifting the cloudspatients and medical staff made statements or were interviewed. PiH chief executive Sandra Bruce-Gordon is sending the book along with a letter to the Prime Minister and Health Secretary, following their recent calls for suggestions to improve the NHS. “Our research clearly shows that art improves health,” says Bruce-Gordon.
Most patient comments in the book are anonymous for privacy reasons. “I’m having chemo and wanted to let you know how nice it is to have art in the waiting area,” says one. “It reminds me that there is life after cancer.” Another talks about going in and out of the hospital, stopping to look at a painting, Heavy seas by Ken Symonds. “It has given me a lot of peace before my appointments. I hope I can recover and go to the sea itself.”
Another patient, recently admitted to the Maudsley psychiatric hospital in London, said: ‘When the ward was open, I would sneak into the cafe in the outpatient department and stare at the paintings on the wall. It gave me a break from the humdrum of the dreary neighborhood.”
Clinical staff also see benefits. “When you come to a hospital you come for difficult reasons,” says Peter Wilkinson, consultant cardiologist at Ashford and St Peter’s Trust, Kent. His hospital has some Warhol prints. “They distract you from your worries.”
Wynford Ellis Owen, CEO of Cardiff’s Living Room, an addiction recovery centre, where June Forster’s Winter landscape hung up, said: “It was invaluable in our therapeutic work. The many shapes and colors of the painting showed that human life itself must be viewed from both the dark and the light side.”
“We wanted to make our new premises modern, friendly and interesting,” says Susan Rankine, senior partner at Victoria Medical Center in Westminster.
She believes that the arts are chosen, inclusive Anemone and jugs by Paula Vincent, relieves anxiety.
Earlier this year, Southampton’s Shirley Health Partnership consulted 1,100 patients and staff about PiH works at its new premises. Stella Rankin’s Daffodils and Wilhelmina Barns-Graham’s Millennium Blue II are among the 30 selected pieces.
Artworks are often chosen for their suitability, such as the inspiring paintings of Welsh rugby internationals in the stroke rehabilitation center at University Hospital in Llandough.
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There is also new scientific support to support PiH’s evidence, including two studies with the Arts Fund. Visitors to the Courtauld Gallery in London were given headphones which showed that dopamine levels of pleasure and comfort in the brain were increased by Van Gogh and Monet’s landscapes, but lowered by some abstracts.
Another test with University College London involved 6,700 adults over 50, who were asked about their gallery visits 15 years ago, and again this year. The results showed that paintings reduced anxiety and depression and helped people live longer.
In the Netherlands, neuroresearch company Neurensics produced results from visitors watching Vermeer in October Girl with a pearl earring in the Mauritshuis Museum. Their brains were stimulated again and again by her eyes, mouth and earring.
“The longer they watched, the more involved and satisfied they were,” says Martin de Munnik of Neurensics.