The Healing Power of Landscape Paintings

I recently found an uplifting and interesting tidbit for those of us who enjoy painting landscapes. According to Dr. John Diamond, in his 1979 book Your Body Doesn't Lie, when a person looks at a landscape painting it will raise their level of well being, balance their right and left brain hemispheres and increase their life energy. The book describes Dr. Diamond’s research and practice for Behavioral Kinesiology (BK), which uses muscle testing from Kinesiology to test for factors in the environment that raise and lower a person’s energy or life force. He muscle tested patients for music, electronic devices, picture symbols, food, just about everything, as well as paintings. He found that a photograph of a landscape or an actual view of a landscape did not come close to the life giving qualities from a landscape painting (!)

Here is a quote (p. 76 in Dr. Diamond’s book) “…The results are not nearly so satisfactory with line drawings or with photographs. Looking at a beautiful scene in nature may or may not be as effective, depending on the ability of the viewer to abstract certain qualities from it, which is, after all, what a good painter has already done for us. I have found that if people take an “energy break” every so often – just to recite a verse or two of poetry or to look at a picture postcard of a painting, stress and tension will be considerably reduced……and the Life Energy will be high…”

How cool is that?