Art pill
Recently I have met with an interesting woman – Anna Kozachenko – second-generation immigrant from Ukraine. She works at a local art gallery, continuing the passion of her grandmother who used to be an artist back in Ukraine and who pushed Anna to work in this industry. A little over forty today, Anna shared some unbelievable stories about her childhood and about her visits to homeland that left her more puzzled rather than gave her understanding of her roots. In a brief interview that we had, I realized that we live in such a surreal time. We have access to all the information in the world but we only know the surface. In order to dive into something seriously we need to meet with people like Anna. Such people can open your eyes to subjects you had no idea were connected.
We met at the art gallery where she works, that is a walking distance from the center. She showed me around and explained why contemporary art is being stigmatized and undervalued by the general public. She says that after thousands of years when the artist was generally the executor, it is hard to shift to a world where an artist is the protagonist. Also today, she explained, it is not the academic impeccable painting that is valued, but the idea. Eventually, you can teach anybody to paint, but not everybody who paints can bring something new, something extraordinary to the ”table”. She explained that of course, there are some artists whose paintings sell at Christie’s of Sotheby’s for insane amount of money, who are products of PR only, but there are many contemporary artists who turn the art world upside down with the depth of their imagination.
Anna’s father has a long history of chronic heart disease. Over the time he had several surgeries. Some of them were done back in Ukraine. He used to say that it is not the pain, not the surgery but the recovery time that is so stressful. He described his days, lying in dark gloomy hospitals as the worse days of life. It was not the angry nurse who would come and “bark” at the patients, not even the moaning neighbors in the hospital room, but the grey walls and the ceiling where spiders have built a megalopolis out of their webs. Then they moved to the West and his last surgery happened in a private hospital. This time the recovery was the best part. Classical music was playing in the hall, walls were covered with famous art copies, and pretty flowers were by the windows. He remembers going from wall to wall, examining the art pieces and then during Anna’s visits asked to tell him more about the works. Anna says, those were the most popular paintings, such as Monet’s “Water lilies”, Degas’s “Dancers”, Boticelli’s “Spring”, and other pleasing to the eye and performed in neutral color palette paintings. Impressionists, she says, were dominating the hospital space. Looking at the growing interest of her father and seeing his recovery pace, Anna realized there was something behind all this that made a difference. She knew about art therapy – art classes that helped people get over psychological and even some chronical diseases, but she never thought about how art made an impact on overall healing of a person. So, as she says, she ran home and searched the Internet for the possible connections. To her great surprise, there were numerous researches that confirmed that artwork at hospitals can help in the healing process (Kalter). She talked to her father and they decided not to let this go unnoticed. They went to a public hospital near the train station and asked if they could paint some of their recovery rooms with famous art pieces. The hospital promised to get back within a week. In a month, Anna and her father finally managed to push their idea and in another week, they hired street artists that were famous for their murals to paint over the hospital rooms. Anna says it is too soon to tell about the healing results of their own personal research but the hospital staff says that patients prefer to stay in the painted rooms. Anna laughs, telling me this story. She says “I though, I was going to dedicate my life to art, but now it seems that I would need another medical education”. She invited me to some day visit her home, to show me paintings of her grandmother that are, according to Anna full of light and color. She hopes to display them in hospitals one day. I write “One day”, because at the moment Anna is negotiating about this initiative with several other public hospitals, and if everything will go according to her plan, she may be pushing the hospital-art idea to the city officials.
Works Cited
Kalter, Lindsay. “Artwork at hospitals can help in the healing process”. Phys.org. 11 April 2009. Web.
