“East Week” has interviewed a female artist, who was suffering from depression, picked up her childhood interest in painting for not only cultivating her temperament, but also healing emotional illness.
During the interview, she demonstrated the watercolour painting and completed a drawing.
“Painting is good for expressing your emotions. You may shift the focus from your unhappiness to things that you like, in order to make yourself happy,” Psychiatrist Doris Chan said.
In addition, some changes in emotional patients can be observed from the style of painting. For example, when the patient is depressed, the painting style is relatively dark. The reason is that the patient usually sees the black and white world during depression. When the patient feels better, the colour tone will gradually increase so the world drawn will gradually become colourful.
Take the above picture as an example, the painter drew a red leaf tree by watercolour painting. Dr Doris Chan analyzes the mind as follow:
“This painting looks like depicting the autumn scenery. It shows some maple leaves falling, which is calm. I believe that the painter is calm too. However, autumn is not a very energetic season. I hope that after the leaves have fallen in autumn, then sprouts grow in spring. The emotion will be similar to this so that it is new and refreshing.”