Authors Electric

  The Curative Power of Art A Reading of  Art Cure  by Daisy Fancourt This book is proof if any were needed that an engagement with the arts is good for us. The Art that the author Daisy Fancourt refers to in it belongs to several different creative areas, such as music, dance, poetry and storytelling, and she has followed the first of these throughout her life as an accomplished piano player. In her prelude to the book, she says that behaviour connected to the arts can have a big influence on our health. For example: ‘If children engage with art workshops, choirs, book clubs, dance classes, drama groups or bands they are less likely to be lonely or develop behavioural problems…’ Nor is this book just a speculative account. Throughout it the author tells us about her engagement with specialist academic teams in areas of Psychobiology and Epidemiology, for which she is a Professor at UCL, researching how biological processes relate to human experience such as the emotions....

Dad always worked with his hands. He’d been trained as a carpenter and joiner, but after the war he joined Mum’s family building firm and learned to be a plasterer. I think these jobs must require total absorption – getting the consistency and thickness perfectly right, making changes in body movement to accommodate to distance-from-core,   constantly judging the state of the receiving wall...and all on what looks like automatic pilot; a deeply-embedded skill. All the time he was working, he sang. He sang completely unselfconsciously, almost as if he didn’t know he was doing it. He’d had his voice trained as a child by a formidable aunt (she was an LRAM, spoken in a hushed whisper) until she threw him out for misbehaving. He had a fine tenor voice and had picked up snatches of Italian opera. They were my first foreign words, but not much use in general conversation: None shall sleep! Your tiny hand is frozen! On with the motley, the powder and the paint! Love me, Alfr...