My ‘Behind The Scenes’ series allows viewers to learn more about what went into the making of an image. When viewing a photo, you might well be wondering what the whole area looked like, rather than just what fit into the confines of the framed artwork. You might also be wondering 'is that what it really looked like?’, since part of any artwork incorporates the artist’s interpretation into it. In this post I intend to answer some of those questions for my image entitled ‘Water, Land, and Sky’ from my ‘The Sea’ portfolio.

On the hospital floor where postoperative gallbladder patients recovered, some of the rooms had windows that offered a view of a brick wall, while others looked out onto a large stand of trees. The rooms were otherwise exactly the same. It was decided to evaluate whether this one environmental difference could be playing a role in patient recovery.

For this post, I thought I would just summarize the findings gathered from multiple studies that have been done on the interaction between art and the patient (as opposed to hospital staff) experience.

Who doesn’t love looking at a beautiful garden? But did you know that there can be health benefits to a garden as well? Studies done in the late 1990s at several hospitals in California found that

In 1993, a group of researchers in Sweden wanted to determine whether certain types of art could have an effect on the postoperative course of cardiac surgery patients.

When viewing nature and landscape scenes, the viewer sees one moment frozen in time. Often they want to know more. They might well be wondering what the whole area looked like, rather than what fit into the confines of the framed artwork. They might also be wondering 'is that what it really looked like’? I thought that an intermittent series of posts, which I will call ‘Behind The Scenes’, might provide some insight into those questions.