What Art?

Have you decided to add some art to your life?  Neuroscience research makes it clear when it’s best to add what:

• Looking at nature scenes—in paintings, in photographs, etc.—helps you mentally refresh after you’ve exhausted your brain doing knowledge work. What nature scenes work best?  Ones that are clearly recognizable as nature, whether they have a few manmade elements in them (say a quiet lane or a barn seen at a distance) or not. Clumps of trees with branches that seem like they could provide shelter from menacing things on the ground scattered across a meadow and peaceful-looking (but calm) water work well.   Best of all are ones that it seems that you could step into, just as Mary Poppins and her friends enter Bert’s chalk drawings.  These images are also relaxing to look at. Don’t know which images to go with still?  Pick ones that could be of places near to where the art is being viewed to up relaxation and restoration value.  Finally, pictures of flowers are particularly good at reducing our stress levels.
• If you’re not into nature, or you have as much nature art around as you can tolerate, relax by adding art that features curving lines and not very saturated but light colours (sage greens or smokey blues with lots of white pigment mixed into them). That art will help you relax, whether it’s a painting or a sculpture or something else.  Want art to rev people up, get them moving down a hallway fast, etc.? Go with geometric options featuring saturated, darker colours (such as Kelly green or sapphire blue). We also prefer art with more curvy lines to pieces with more straight ones.
• More on art fundamentals: we tend to enjoy symmetrical art more and pieces that seem more balanced (i.e., less likely to tumble to one side or another).
• Use art created by people who share the viewer’s culture (or from a culture that viewers are very familiar with) and even better, art which seems relevant to the lives they’ve lived, their self-schema/identity, viewers like it better.
• When art gives us something to ponder (and it’s important to understand any symbolism present), to think about, the odds increase that we’ll like it. Seeing abstract art can boost abstract thinking compared to representational art’s effects but we generally like figurative/representational art more than abstract pieces.
• Art that makes us feel nostalgic can help us think more creatively and to interact more pleasantly with people with whom we feel we share the people we share nostalgic experiences with.
• People who are extroverted feel much more positively about seeing people in art than introverts, who often prefer a nature scene (no people).
• Select human-done and not AI-created art—research shows we prefer pieces from human hands to others, particularly when we know “who” made what we are looking at. Best of all is art we ourselves have created—we like what we make—we rate art that we ourselves generate quite positively.