Abuse Showing Up in Art: Relevance

Throughout this blog, I've had a major point I'm trying to make but not fully getting there: abuse is showing up in art. Definition of art can mean anything from a doodle, a drawing, a painting, poetry, stories, music, and so much more--it's not just limited to the drawing and the painting realm.

However, abuse is easiest found in paintings and drawings.

National Library of Medicine describes art as a window to abuse and stating, "Empirical and clinical work in art therapy and allied fields has shown that drawings enable the expression of hidden or repressed thoughts and feelings in a relatively fast and straight forward way"

I would argue that this is not limited to drawings just like we've seen different artists express what has happened to them through stories, essays, music, and such.

NF, a once-famous Christian rapper, described that he used his rap music specifically as therapy as he describes reactions to abuse and trauma within a multitude of songs including, but no limited to: Mansion, Therapy Session, How Could You Leave Us? and Let You Down. I have listened to these songs in middle and high school and sometimes NF still pops up on an occasional playlist and he describes how his mother's drug addiction not only caused her to neglect her child--but her passing put him in the primary care of his father--who was verbally and emotionally abusive.

Now, NF is blatant about what happened in his form of art.

National Library of Medicine even describes children's drawings as an ability to see that expression of experienced-abuse.

In the research this government-funded site has done, they state "According to the authors, colors, shapes, and motifs can all represent the unconscious, ideas, distressful feelings and thoughts, concerns, and worries, adding layers of meaning to verbal content".

There are so many layers just for children's drawings? There's so much more in written works like we've seen in Poe and Woolf.

I'm excited to tear apart another one of Woolf's pieces or Poe's to pick apart the potential expression of said experiences. Sources: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7840510/ https://www.cbc.ca/arts/alicia-elliott-abuse-in-strange-loops-and-tar-1.6813105