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Art Appreciation

Visit an Art Gallery and Recharge Your Senses

Wakening awareness and creative impulses

Christopher P Jones
5 min readApr 19, 2023

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Cape Cod Morning (1947) by Edward Hopper. Oil on canvas. 101.98 × 87 cm. Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C, U.S. Image source WikiArt

There’s no place quite like being inside an art gallery. Most museums have no windows or clocks, so it becomes easy to lose track of what’s going on outside. The weather, the politics, and the crowded streets all fade away.

Scientific studies have found that interaction with art reduces stress and lowers blood pressure. One significant study of over 50,000 Norwegians concluded that there was a strong correlation between cultural activities and positive life outcomes. Researchers found that participation in cultural events, like trips to art galleries and museums, “was significantly associated with good health, good satisfaction with life, low anxiety and depression.”

Awaken Your Creative Impulses

When you look at a work of art — I mean, truly stand still and observe, permitting the minutes to pass — the object before you reveals itself. Simply by looking and noticing the ways the work is constructed, how the light falls, where the balance sits, the parts of the artwork that are symmetrical and the parts that break the symmetry, and so on, your own creative impulses are stirred.

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