ART FOR HEART'S SAKE

Practising art - or just looking at it - can improve your health. Here's why we shouldn't brush off the benefits

- by IAN TAYLOR

It was Pablo Picasso who said – with some painterly flamboyance - that, “Art washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life.” It’s good for you – is what I think he was getting at.

Some 50 years after Picasso's death, it's beginning to look like he was right. Researchers are learning that the health benefits of creating or consuming art are anything but abstract. It can have genuine physiological and psychosomatic effects.

Just looking at art can lower a person's heart rate, blood pressure and cortisol levels, sometimes in real time. Some artsy activities can even reduce markers of inflammation in the body or improve neuroplasticity in the brain. There are targeted creative therapies, too.