The Populism of Art

Why anyone can draw and everyone should

By Jeannette Cooperman

July 31, 2025

Essays

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“Art is a natural activity familiar to children. In adults, being overwhelmed with the blank paper and the fear of being judged are obstacle factors.”

Reclaiming the creative in ourselves

My watercolor teacher peers over his glasses at my latest effort, then shakes his head ruefully. “You and your details,” he sighs. I already know the instructions he is about to repeat: loosen up, for God’s sake. Be more painterly. I paint like a medieval copyist in a monastery, obsessed with gilding the capitals, blissed by the rapt concentration the details demand. It cuts me free from routine, obligation, and worry, sending me into a dreamy ether that has no idea what day it is or who is president. It also makes me wonder why I ever gave this up?

At six, like most any child, I was exuberant, paint splattered everywhere. By ten, I was wary. We used to joke about the math brain in the class, call him “Professor,” maybe steal his pants in gym class. But we all kept trying to do the terrible math problems, because we had to. Art was elective, and most of us veered away as soon as we saw the handful of kids with “real talent.”

For me it was Lucy and Julie, and I can still remember the wonder of their delicate, true sketches. Lucy and Julie were clearly Artists, and in American culture, being an artist is a binary category: you either are one or are not. If not, you stop trying. It takes a midlife or late-life crisis to reassure you that there is a continuum, and it glows with a million ways to be creative.

How cool would it be to presume that every human being is, if not an Artist, still an artist? Even our language would change: instead of the tiresome “What do you do?” we might ask “What’s inspiring you lately? What are you trying to create?”

How art makes you less likely to categorize experience

If you are a veteran with PTSD, or a woman who has escaped domestic violence or trafficking, or a person with a disability, illness, or addiction, the category itself—powerless, limiting, embarrassing—can stop you from feeling the least bit creative. But walk through the door of the St. Louis nonprofit Artists First, and you leave the label behind. You, like everyone else here, are an artist.

And that changes you.

Talking with executive director Sheila Suderwalla, I see her look out through her office’s glass wall and smile. Someone has just picked up her mess of paint, brushes, and paper towels and moved to another table in order to sit next to someone who, until now, she would never have wanted to associate with. Racism, classism, all sorts of barriers fall away here.

Art exists, Chekhov said, to prepare the soul for tenderness.

“Some artists have come here almost nonverbal and really improved,” says program manager Catie Deck, talking about the confidence it gives you to make something on your own. Watching other people react to what you have made closes the circle. You are communicating without, beyond, words. The other day, Deck tells me, she was talking about heartbreak and “what that would look like, in line or color, and where do you feel that in your own body?” Art heightens our awareness of what we observe and what we feel. It clarifies.

And there is no arguing. Art just is. “You can discover more about a person in an hour of play than in a year of conversation,” Plato remarked. Every aspect reveals: the choice of dull or vibrant colors, the weight and slash of the brushstrokes, their meticulousness or exuberance. In social life, we tend to be reductive: “I’m a Pisces,” or “I’m an introvert,” or “I’m a Midwesterner,” as though that settles the question. But a style? That is far richer, far more complex. It contains all sorts of information, some obvious, some disguised. Yet you need no training to recognize its presence.

How to feel like an artist and how not to

It is Monday, Veterans Night at Artists First. As people sketch and paint at one of the big tables, idle chitchat skitters back and forth. A young woman—call her Jennifer—complains about Anselm Kiefer’s Brennstäbe (Fuel Rods) at the Saint Louis Art Museum, how it is just junk. Another woman looks up the painting on her cellphone and reads us a description of the symbolism, from Osiris to Chernobyl.

“Still not a fan,” Jennifer mutters.

We talk a little more, but she is adamant: “I hate it!”

“But you feel something,” points out Jimmie Williams. “That’s what he wants.”

“And what you feel,” I chime in, “happens to be exactly what he was painting. Anger and frustration.” Jennifer, who is new here, asks me not to use her real name and insists that she is not an artist.

“She’ll think of herself as an artist in a few months,” predicts Williams. “I didn’t think of myself as an artist until I started coming here. I kept working on bigger and bigger canvases. One day I said, ‘I don’t have a style,’ and a girl said, ‘Oh, yes, you do. If I came in here and looked around, I’d know which was yours.’” Williams smiles. “Other people help me a lot when we talk. And when I won first place in the veterans’ art show, I did feel like an artist, because I had been recognized as an artist. Somebody was looking at my work.”

We talk about how kids start out as artists and lose confidence. “They should go to museums and see all the different ways you can do art,” exclaims Williams. “Look at Picasso!”

“Let’s not,” mutters Jennifer. But then she turns serious. “People have been told time and time again that they have to conform. So, your voice gets taken away.”

“If you don’t yet feel like an artist,” I say, “does it still help to come here and make art?”

She nods, hard. “It’s something tangible to help create focus, so I can think about something else.” She reaches for a green pencil, adds a leaf. “My thoughts can be concrete.” “Does it help ease what you’ve been through?” “Yeah. I would say, yes.” She looks up, meets my eyes. “More so than anything else.”

Why beauty is more complicated than you think

I understand Jennifer’s recoil. Modern art became so rarified, so noncommunicative and snooty, that it was easy to forget what art can do for all of us. It can—in its old-fashioned form—bring beauty, and beauty soothes our spirit. It smooths away cares, distracts us from pain, reminds us what is possible in this often drab and shadowy world.

Beauty fell out of fashion in art, as did realism, but they creep back now and then because we hunger for them. Harmonious colors please our brains, as do repeated shapes and decorative patterns. Humans are especially good at recognizing patterns; we had to, to survive. Even now, with air-conditioned grocery stores and takeout, we still feel that tiny burst of elation when a blur of disparate marks comes into focus and we recognize what we are seeing.

“Beauty is vanishing, because we live as though it did not matter.” Those words from philosopher Roger Scruton send a chill through me. They are true in so many ways: our greedy city planning, our rushed lives, our poor trashed environment. But there is no quicker way to remember beauty than with a paintbrush in your hand. Trying to find the right colors and shapes is an exercise in creating something we all crave.

But wait—is that true? Or are some of us more sensitive to beauty, hungrier for it, while others gaze unmoved and tap a foot, eager to get on with the practical business of life?

Beauty might need a wider definition. Art need not be pretty, or easy, or hang well over the sofa. Truth, Keats reminded us, is another form of beauty. Real emotion, fresh thought. Anything that is genuine, and startles us into seeing.

Art, said Picasso, “washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life.”

Dogs do not make art, but chimps sure do

I want to make these words beautiful—they are about art, and need to deserve it. But they stay pale, shriveled things, refusing to take on color. I tug at them, scrape a few away, add others for decoration. Somehow, they must convey the importance of this gift, this extraordinary capacity that is unique to our species.

Or is it? Once I sighed in pity for our dog, that he was unable to appreciate beauty, and my husband looked up over his spectacles. “Is he? Are you sure?” Watching Willie ignore the sunset and sniff delicately at the residual piss of a schnauzer, yeah, I was pretty sure. But how to explain the sand sculptures that Torquigener pufferfish make for the hell of it? Bower birds use crushed fruit to stain their nests different colors. Congo the chimpanzee drew or painted hundreds of works, and he carefully controlled his mark-making, evolving a style.

Maybe just being alive is an art project.

Why making art is as needful as growing roses

“When you’re a kid, you want to be an artist,” remarks Jimmie Williams. “Then the real world happens.” She spent decades in front of a computer. Now she is retired and has begun what she dreamed. She pulls out a canvas board, a half-finished landscape.

“I didn’t know you could do watercolor on canvas,” I blurt.

“I didn’t know you couldn’t,” she counters, grinning. She is entirely self-taught. She does not volunteer anything about her military service, but later, someone else forces the question, and she says she was in the Navy, Special Services.

“I hope you got to stay somewhere safe,” I say. She does not answer. Another woman at the table, also a vet, meets my eyes and says quietly, “No.”

Williams would rather talk about art. “First I’d look at old photographs and copy them,” she says. “Or I’d do fashion drawings from magazines. Initially, I had to have a reference. But after a while, you just say, what can I do with this that’s different?”

So there is hope for me.

She tilts her watercolor. “Actually, this was Bevo Mill. But the street was here, and I didn’t like that.” Now there is a lake—she is making it sparkle with sunlight—and bright flowers at the edge. “I like color. As an artist, you tend to see all the different colors in one color. If you’re looking at the sky, you’ll see a thousand colors, and somebody else will just see blue.”

Williams once read a book about perception, how other people are not necessarily even seeing what you see. Their associations are different, too: “The kitchen table when you were a child may have been square, and somebody else’s may have been round.”

“Oval,” volunteers Jennifer.

Unlike our current culture, art navigates difference and subjectivity. Also pain. I brave a question about traumatic memories.

“It helps to push them out,” Williams says. “Different people do different types of art. Me, I do art that pushes all those bad things out, replaces the memories with beauty. Those who do dark art, it lets them get it out. It can work both ways.”

She dabs more red onto her flowers. (Her flowers, I type instinctively. An artist lays claim.) When she paints, all her troubles vanish. “You just kind of become the canvas. My aunt used to grow roses, and when she was dying, she said, ‘Who’s going to take care of my roses?’ I tried, and I found out it was the same feeling.” Hands in the soil, hands smeared with paint—“it’s as close to God as you’re going to get on Earth.”

How art helps cure alienation

Kevin Roberts, the unofficial mayor of the Field of Hope encampment on the edge of downtown St. Louis, wants to start an art program for people who are unhoused. “Come together and just draw and color,” he explains. “Just to ease your mind.”

Why does art ease our minds? I think because it takes us away from words, lets us express what words cannot. “Words get twisted,” remarks Jennifer Bruner, an art therapist at St. Louis Children’s Hospital. “We can use them to circle around things and never get to what we need to express. Or we say something impulsively and then regret it.”

Bruner sets words aside. Just watching her clients’ hands move, she can figure out what kinds of art materials might help them open up—trust her, and more than that, trust themselves. With that easing of suspicion and fear, anxiety will lose its grip.

A child comes in, vibrating with restless energy, ricocheting from one thing to the next—until she sits him down with paper and paint. “Once they get that medium in front of them, their body becomes quiet,” she tells me, marveling at the power of it even after years of watching it work. The nonstop chatter…stops. “They are engaged, focused, relaxed.”

Other kids come in silent, tight with anxiety. Or furious, screaming unintelligibly. Bruner opens a pack of Model Magic and silently hands it to them. Within seconds, they are pulling, tugging, manipulating the stuff—and the upset is forgotten. “Different materials have different ways of connecting with our brain,” she explains. “Clay hits the kinesthetic, sensory, instinctive part.” Her eventual goal is to move them through all parts of the brain, integrating perceptions and emotions, thoughts and beliefs. But she does not rattle them with directions, and she does not allow herself to probe. “If I start asking questions, it’s going to interrupt what’s going on in their brain. My role is containing, holding that space for them.”

“Just scribble,” she often urges, and the paper nearly tears with the release of frantic energy. “Now, cut it up, and reorganize those scraps of pain into something positive. If you don’t use every piece, that’s okay, because do we want to hold on to all that negative stuff? No. Let it go!”

Sometimes she has clients draw their past, then whatever they want their future to look like. The difference is always a jolt. In private practice, she worked with a woman who had experienced abuse and was now in her sixties. Bruner traced her body and hung the life-size drawing on the wall, and the woman started painting the areas of trauma and stress, her brushstrokes necessarily large—and freeing. Physical movement can carry us past inhibition.

A preteen hospitalized for months because of substance abuse steadily refuses to make art—until the week before his discharge. “Okay,” Bruner says, “we’re going to make this really big poster, and use tape, and then you’re going to paint.” The idea is for the tape to section off different thoughts and feelings, giving each their own home in his brain—but she does not belabor the theory. His brow furrows with concentration, and he splashes a different mix of colors into each section. His body changes, the old, habitual tension now channeled into intention. His mood lifts. When he is finished, he slowly peels off the tape. Bruner holds her breath: sometimes paint seeps under the tape. But a clean grid is emerging, and when she glances at his face, she sees a small smile. She exhales. “What are you going to do with it?” she asks.

“I’m giving it to my grandma,” he says. “Can I make another one now?”

Why making art can be liberating

Children from violent homes draw monsters, black rainbows, dragons breathing fire, adults with enlarged mouths and sharp teeth, children tiny by comparison, with features missing. They are doing exactly what Picasso did with Guernica.

Imagine living through that war. Or doing search and rescue after 9/11, or the St. Louis tornado, the California wildfires, the New Orleans flood. Kathy Sullivan cofounded Ashes2Art for first responders, because when you are part of that much havoc and devastation, it steals your equanimity. Somehow you need the worst to shrink back to its proper proportion, stop dominating even an ordinary day.

It helps, Sullivan found, if you can return to the innocence that once let you draw and paint without self-consciousness. “You get to mess up!”—which means a great deal to people who do jobs where messing up could cause someone to die. Art is a safe experiment. They can let whatever they make express the fullness of their emotions, so they are no longer locked up inside and clawing for release.

At the Center for Mind-Body Medicine, a nonprofit in D.C. that focuses on population-wide psychological trauma, art-based techniques have reduced the number of participants qualifying for the diagnosis of PTSD by 80 percent.

But you need not be a hero or a survivor (though just by being human, you are both) to need art. I have watched one friend after another reach midlife, after demanding, successful careers, and begin to paint or weave or work with clay. Even when it begins as a whim, the creating takes on unexpected power. Soon they are working through, with their bodies, old pain or lost joy. They paint what they struggled with as children or what they hate in the world. Or they craft a sweeter, kinder world in miniature, one they wish existed all around them.

There is mischief in creation, after all. You are plotting and scheming, not mindlessly obeying. “Every creative act is going to be unprepared for,” Joseph Campbell pointed out, “and consequently it is going to break rules.” That is where the freedom begins. And that is what I, the medieval copyist, have not yet reached. Someday, I promise myself, I will feel skilled enough to let go.

Meanwhile, just trying is changing me. Art loosens us up, makes our brains more flexible as we play and experiment. Feelings bubble up and find release. Mind and body are tied together in new ways. Others can see what we have made, welcome it, connect with it. All this is obvious—but something deeper is also happening.

We each possess a fortune: 100 billion neurons apiece, each one connected to about 10,000 other neurons. Quadrillions of connections, an infinite number of circuits undergirding everything we do, say, think, and feel. They are “plastic” (a term I hate. Why not a natural metaphor like wet clay, something that is not choking the world?) Every time we learn and remember something, we strengthen some of those connections and make others weaker. We are sculpting our own brain circuitry.

What does this have to do with art? Making it rewires our brains. There is also a bit of alchemy involved: neurochemicals, hormones, and endorphins bringing an emotional release. The mind drops its guard, opens itself to change.

How art reconnects us to our inner child

As a toddler, Nathan Witt would spread paper and crayons out on the floor, and as he colored, the indentations of the flooring would create patterns, adding to the fascination. “It’s easier to create openly when you are a child,” he remarks. “You are imagining purely, without worrying what anyone will think. But how do you remain a child when you grow up? In Zen, they call it beginner’s mind”—doing, not judging.

Witt learned about Artists First from his friend Joy’s mother. “She told me it’s a safe space, and they have all kinds of art materials, and people are very happy here.” That was three years ago, and he has been coming here ever since, sometimes as many as four days a week. “It’s given me purpose and meaning and direction,” he says. “It’s existential, I guess. It’s a way to express yourself and your mind without becoming lost.”

He creates myths and histories with his art, and he is studying the natural world closely so he can make his fantasy illustrations look real. “When you see people’s skin, you have to really look and not just see yellow or brown. There is pink, blue, white where the light falls, and every color interacts with every other color.” He pages through his sketchbook. “Have you seen the Burney relief at the British Museum? Some people interpret it as Ishtar, some think it’s Lilith. I did a copy of that, my own interpretation. Mythology kind of informs how we act and what we believe. And just looking at something beautiful brings you into a state of temporary pure bliss. Recently I did a picture of the inside of a tulip….”

I am having trouble keeping up; philosophy and art history flow easily from his mind. “When you’re painting, the world goes away, right?” I say, stalling for time to take notes.

“At least the negative parts,” he says. “That’s the power of art.”

Of mandalas and nuns

The word “mandala” is ancient and simply refers, in Sanskrit, either to a circle or to the essence contained within a circle. Contained, that is the important part. A mandala holds whatever you give it as tightly as an embrace, keeping the contents stable, focusing your eye inside its border. Almost every world religion has its own version.

Carl Jung believed mandalas could integrate the personality, reveal the unconscious, guide us back to our emotional center. Studies have shown that drawing inside a circle calms us, lowering our heart rate and other markers of stress. Why, I wonder. Because the planet is a circle? Spells are cast in circles. Time circles through seasons, nature through cycles. “The circle is a blueprint representing how the universe works,” says Lori Bailey Cunningham, founder of the Mandala Project. “All things revolve around a center; all things have a point or they do not exist.”

Twenty years ago, while S. Lisa Lazio was working on a doctorate in individual, marriage, and family therapy, she went to a mandala workshop. She was so taken with the potential insights, the grace of it, that she wangled permission from her order, the Sisters of St. Joseph of Carondelet, to fly out to California and learn how to teach this meditative art.

“I’m sitting in this huge square room with forty-five trained artists from all over the world,” she recalls, amused. “Many of them former Catholics who can’t understand what a nun is doing here!” She stayed the course, and later she taught her students at St. Joseph’s Academy how to make mandalas. It was a spiritual exercise she knew would intrigue them—and she also knew it could quiet their teenage anxiety.

She makes mandalas for herself, too. One puzzled her: it looked like a haystack, and she was far from any farms. But she was suffering with multiple internal adhesions at the time, and she later realized that she had drawn, with remarkable accuracy, “the myelin sheath that tightens and knots, with the rest of the nerve sticking out like frayed rope.” She shrugs at the wonder of it. “The mandala was expressing what I was feeling on the inside without knowing it.”

She runs a finger across jewel colors, intricate pattern. “The mandala puts the jigsaw puzzle of your life together, as much of it as you want to look at,” she says. “It’s truer than you can imagine.”

Mandalas and childhood

I start in the center, as instructed. I will make a mandala about my childhood. Feeling my way back to age ten, I draw two figures, a woman and a little girl, then surround them with flowers, a puppy, held hands. Joys that my mother introduced me to, and that anchored our shared life. But in the next circle outward, I shock myself by drawing a mouth covered by two hands. I know immediately what it means: all the care I had to take not to hurt my sensitive mother, not to worry her. Uncomfortable, I decide drawing one mouth is enough; this is just a scribbly experiment. My subconscious has made its point.

But the mandala requires repetition. The same elements again and again, perfectly symmetrical, forming the pattern. Obedient as usual, I sigh and sketch an entire ring of covered mouths. I am beginning to see the method behind the design: by the tenth repetition, you have no choice but to own what you have drawn.

The next band, I keep abstract, using a few curved lines to indicate a child with her arm around her mother, trying to comfort her. Might as well stay honest. She was widowed, lonely, overfocused on me, and I was helpless to fix any of that.

Next, I put the mother behind the little girl, gently pushing her forward with one hand and holding her close with the other. And finally, an entire band of hearts, a symbol I had not let myself put at the center because it seemed so trite and mawkishly sentimental. But I need it. And this way there are even more hearts, each a burst of gratitude for the love she bathed me in.

Ten minutes ago, I was just planning to draw something fun. There is definitely a process at work. Because you have to draw something, something must emerge.

I try another, this time drawing the present. Two adult figures in the center. They are the same height, which is wrong, so to make my husband accurately taller, I have to color his head higher with black ink. This makes him darker, which is temperamentally accurate. A band of alternating clouds and sunshine for what we each focus on. More trees, flowers, dogs, and I add books and friends. A row for stillness—how do I draw that? The “negative capability,” the way we can be quiet in one another’s presence, and peaceful.

The two mandalas, set side by side, are similar—always another person, nature and dogs, pain and love. In the second, I am still the one trying harder to make the other one happy—but I no longer need to silence myself. Smiling, I slide the present on top of the past.

“When you finish, you imagine it dispersed into a million pieces of light and love and energy,” Lazio told me. “They will go where they need to go.” Tibetan Buddhists make their mandalas in sand and let them dissolve. This one was fast and rough on purpose, a deliberate refusal to invest too much—although it still managed to take over. But what if I had made a beautiful mandala? Am I strong enough, egoless enough, to throw it away the minute I finish?

Ego has no place here. Yet ego is essential to art. The usual paradox.

The man who draws botanical illustrations with one eye

Dr. Rob Bohan grins at me, courtesy of WhatsApp, from Dublin. I want to hear about his latest art—bright, graceful images implausibly summoned by the bronchitis that plagues him. But first he wants to know if I have heard of Aran jumpers. Irish fishermen’s sweaters, I translate silently.

“The way to identify bodies is the jumper,” he says. “Each family on the coast, the mother knitted a certain pattern.” He holds up his own. “My grandmother was one of the last women to make them.” He pauses.

“Irish people don’t swim. There’s no point.” If your boat wrecks or runs into a storm, you are dead anyway.

This is a man who can be cheerful in the face of calamity. He grew up in the 1970s and ’80s, “when the Irish economy was doing worse than East Germany. Massive heroin problem, extreme unemployment, the Troubles brewing in the background. No one could afford to be an artist.” So, he chose science and found work in nature conservation. Then he read for the Ph.D. in philosophy at Trinity. On the side, he was doing such exquisite botanical illustrations that botanists began coming to him: “Can you draw this arsenic for me? Just don’t lick your fingers!”

Then, about ten years ago, Bohan began to lose his vision. He slumped into a depression so deep, his family used moral blackmail to insist he seek help. When he showed up at the therapist’s office, he announced, “I can’t think of anything more boring  to talk about than myself, and I’m not sure I’ll be able to. I’ll just turn it into a joke.”

Head cocked, she studied him. “Are you able to draw?”

“Yeah, of course,” he said, not caring that he sounded arrogant.

“I want you to draw your feelings.”

To foil her, he did a botanical drawing of a chrysanthemum. She asked why; what did flowers mean to him. He explained that he had studied botany, so it was a very run-of-the-mill thing to do.

“Well, what does this particular flower mean to you?” she asked.

He went on for a while about Japanese symbolism. “Or, it could just be a botanical drawing.”

“Imagine back when you were a small child,” she suggested. “What’s your first memory of a chrysanthemum?”

And then he saw them: the colorful plastic chrysanthemums a lady had given him when he was six, and how he loved knowing they would last forever. They were in the backyard for years. “And then my dad dug a deep pit and buried all the rubbish, like battered toys. I spent weeks looking for those chrysanthemums.” He pauses. “I had literally drawn my first experience of loss.”

The therapist had him keep drawing, and the momentum built. Soon he had 360,000 followers on X talking to him about his art, because they saw something they were feeling themselves.

But…the vision? He shrugs. “I’m legally blind. One eye sort of works. I just don’t believe in giving up.”

Bohan has no patience for people who protest that they cannot draw: “You can feel, can’t you?” he counters. “As long as people have an idea in their head, they can create art. It doesn’t matter if they draw like a child or they draw like a genius, as long as the emotion is authentic.” Why should an amateur bother? “Because art will help lift them out of themselves. It switches off your consciousness and switches on your subconscious—it’s like dreaming in real life. It’s alive and immediate. You are in the moment; it’s a form of meditation. And somehow it’s relaxing, even though it doesn’t seem like it ought to be. Your subconscious takes over, and that is the most relaxing thing of all. We dream to process our memories, and drawing, meditating, praying, all these things that soothe the mind are forms of dreaming.”

I love that notion. And it holds scientifically, because the brain network that takes over when we drift into dreaminess, the default mode network, is very different from our busy everyday consciousness. When we are alert, a risk monitor is always running in the background, buzzing lightly and sending occasional alarms, most of them false. But when our minds wander or quiet, and rational thought is suspended, the hypervigilance relaxes.

“That’s why art works so well for people with PTSD,” he continues. “If I could get everybody to scribble on a newspaper, I think it would make them feel a lot calmer and happier. But people see art as an elite and ‘other’ thing. It’s not part of their lives the way music is. And it should be, because we live in a time of incredible anxiety.”

Read more by Jeannette Cooperman here.