Caution: Art May Cause You to Feel

I grew up a hundred miles from the nearest art museum, in the infinite flatness of rural Kansas. A fifth-grade field trip brought the first opportunity to visit an art museum, where I found myself drawn in by a particular portrait. I vividly remember what it felt like to tumble headfirst into the emotion of the grieving woman depicted in the painting. As my classmates moved on, empathy—that profoundly human emotional response that allows us to feel what other people are feeling—unleashed within me my own grief. When I left that museum, my shared experience with the woman in the painting followed me.

My art mirrors my work as a psychotherapist. I’m trained to peer through stories like water, watching for the shimmer of emotion in the current. Through narratives of breakups, bickering, disappointments, and traumas big and small, I listen for emotion and coax it forward to a space where it can be cared for, known, and expressed without judgment.

Often, through learning to notice our emotions without judgment, they’re transformed. The foreign becomes familiar as exiled emotions become companions—neither good nor bad, simply present. This panel creates a place for many of the emotions we experience in response to art to exist with a name, a face, and an imagined embodiment.

Working on this piece was an invitation to recall my own emotional experiences in art museums and to consider how those experiences impact the way I engage with art and emotion as a mental health–focused illustrator. The short stories below illustrate how experiences with art may stir up emotions that disrupt, surprise, and prompt us to encounter our emotional selves.

I come across Félix Vallotton’s Laziness (La Paresse). The diminutive size catches me off guard. My first response, “Ooh, a cat!,” makes me laugh to myself.

I stay planted in front of the small print, magnetically pulled into a scene that feels both foreign and familiar. Like a sunny Sunday with no plans. The gallery around me seems to grow quieter. I breathe and my lungs feel a little deeper, my muscles a bit longer. I suppress a sudden urge to stretch as I lean in and notice the opulent layers of soft textiles and patterns.

I feel alert but serene, and suddenly very soft in a hard world. I take a breath and savor the softness before departing.

Having waited with anticipation, I’m finally face to face with Vincent van Gogh’s The Starry Night, and I understand.

“Oh,” I whisper quietly to myself.

My gaze swims through swirls of predawn hues and I feel the energetic bubbles of delight rise like the cypress in the foreground, like the sleepy village below waking to a new day. My face softens and I smile without thinking, the playful strokes of colorful genius inspiring a lightening in my body and straightening in my back.

I feel bright, hopeful, and eager for dawn.