Contemporary Art in Applied Dimensions: A Reflective Review of Art as Therapeutic Process

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A common perception about contemporary art is the perception that it excludes a majority of people as being its legitimate viewers or judges, by virtue of the fact that it contains exclusive or encrypted messages. A small, privileged group of experts grant value, acceptance and endow public popularity of such works for the market and media. In this research we seek to provide an insight into a cluster of contemporary abstract art forms and show how such art forms anticipate closer and more common sensory and hermeneutic experience. Art like that of Hamish Fulton is built on experiences that enables us to connect with them, thereby redefining the concepts and ideas of these arts through an alternative phenomenological experience of their methods and processes of making art. Fulton’s art is based on a visual translation of his experiences of healing walks through mountainous terrain. We may build a personal, general methodology of interpretation by building personal synergistic links with the methods of creation – that could in turn generate therapeutic effects both in the viewer or in the interpreter of such art, through self-reflection and re-construction of the concepts proposed in the framing. Likewise, we will reflect briefly on art therapeutic projects that we studied for patients with ADHD. We analyze the expressions and suggest a method of therapeutic art creation based on similar processes as in Fulton.