Health Care Fine Art

Religious Art Offers Pain Relief to Believers

Of these two pictures by Leonardo da Vinci only the Virgin Mary reduced pain.

New research suggests that when believers view religious art they experience less pain.

Practicing Catholics perceived electrical shocks while viewing an image of the Virgin Mary (above right) as less painful than shocks delivered while looking at a non-religious picture (above left). In contrast, professed atheists and agnostics derived no pain relief from viewing the same religious image while getting uncomfortably zapped on the hand.

The research was done by Katja Wiech of the University of Oxford in England. Bruce Bower wrote an article describing the research in the October 11th issue of Science News.

To read the full article click here

I wonder about the implications of this research on art selection in hospitals. If a patient is known to have strong religious beliefs, should an attempt be made to change the art in their surroundings to offer images which trigger religious feelings?

Thanks to Dr. Upali Nanda for pointing this out to me.

The Winner: Incorporating Faith Based Artwork into the Modern Healthcare Environment

One of the pictures from the winning installation.

Eva Payne won the contest to describe her most challenging healthcare art project and how she solved it. The problem she dealt with was incorporating faith-based artwork into the modern healthcare environment. Here is what she wrote:                   

Artwork selection may be the most subjective area of an interior designers work.  Although many studies exist which suggest that certain subject matter and color palettes may aid in the creation of the healing environment, selling those concepts to a rural, up and coming faith based hospital administrative staff is another matter. 

Artwork selection has been the most contentious ongoing issue with a client wishing to focus primarily on their faith mission.  As a community hospital the budget was not available to commission artwork, and most prints and lithographs currently available with a Christian theme are not particularly sophisticated artistically. Given this lack of quality images it is quite difficult to assemble an art package large enough to address all of the needs of a hospital.  After working through several art consultants and a selective hospital art committee we were able to compromise in several ways.

A few images of churches and crosses were utilized; bible verses were inscribed in mats under peaceful landscape images, in lieu of artwork in some areas metal letters were used simply with the words such as, “Faith”, “Hope”, and “Love” from Corinthians I.  Moving in this direction made the committee more comfortable with using some botanical images alone to evoke a soothing, nature oriented theme with photographs of flowers and regional landscapes.  Although getting to this solution was quite trying at times, the project achieved both the goal of inspiring patients and visitors with the Christian message while creating a modern healing environment.

Eva said that the bible verses under the images are a little hard to read on the snapshot shown about - but they are there.

Eva Payne  ASID IIDA  LEED AP is an Interior Designer at TRO Jung|Brannen in Birmingham Alabama. She is a senior associate.

I have already packed up her award, a brand new  signed-copy of Jain Malkin's essential new book - A Visual Reference for Evidence-Based Design. A $200 value.

Picking the winner was difficult. There were many excellent entries. The entries were so good that I decided to give awards to two other contestants. The two runners up (Jeffrey Yentz and Angela Ahrens) will each be gettign a brand new copy of HealthCare Spaces 4.

Thanks to all who entered the conest!