The Emotional Power of Art

“Art can save us… Art has the power to render sorrow beautiful, make loneliness a shared experience and transform despair into hope. The magic of all art is the ability to both capture our pain and deliver us from it at the same time.” ~ Brené Brown

Art saves lives. That of the artist and that of the viewer. Art serves as a vital creative release for the artistic being whose need to create is as strong as the need to breathe. The viewer may feel deeply alone and misunderstood until they encounter a particular work of art that suddenly articulates the inarticulate… they feel Seen. And a little less alone. A work of art has healed a piece of their souls: the one who created it in the act of creation, and the one who experienced it and was forever touched or inspired by it.

“There must be something about art… almost all cultures have done art. It’s a refining of the senses, which are there to keep us alive. As far as we know, no other animals do that.” ~ Roy Lichtenstein

Solitude or Loneliness

Throughout the centuries, artists have struggled with and/or embraced the specter or blessing of being alone. Some have felt outcast by society or by tragic world circumstance, and others prefer to create in the bliss of solitude. Whether an artist is sociable or not, the eventual outcome is the lone encounter of artist and blank canvas.

The following are some legendary artists who have wrestled with their own demons and have expressed themselves so eloquently and with such humanity that their art lives on throughout history as testimony of the courage and empathy of the human spirit.

Edvard Munch

The brilliant painter of the famous painting “The Scream,” a masterpiece of isolation, Edvard Munch captures the agony and despair that characterized his life and work. Munch often found himself isolated from society, due in part to a long history of mental illness and poor health in his family. This feeling of isolation is reflected in his compositions, which feature painfully detached individuals or groups who are alone in the company of other people.

Munch’s “The Scream” is one of the most famous paintings of the Modernist period. The painting depicts a figure whose face is contorted in an agonized scream. The background is a bleak and desolate landscape. The figure is isolated and alone, seemingly cut off from the world around him.

In 1908, after a bout of alcoholism and breakdowns, he was admitted to a mental health clinic in Denmark. He once said, “I can not get rid of my illnesses, for there is a lot in my art that exists only because of them.”

His work continues to speak volumes on the current situation of an individual facing uncertainty in our rapidly changing world.

Edward Hopper

His cool, contemporary command of the visual language of loneliness is sublime. Of his cinematic masterpiece “Nighthawks” Edward Hopper recollected, “…unconsciously, probably, I was painting the loneliness of a large city.” Within the glass bubble of the al