SERENE: The painter completes details of a mural painting depicting a woman with a child in the maternity wing of Rivadavia Hospital, Buenos Aires.

By Cecilia Caminos

An Argentinian campaign to brighten up hospital walls was born of the tragic death in a Buenos Aires clinic of a talented young and freshly married artist, Pedro Oliveira.
“I need the colours of my paintings on these white walls if I have to stay here and fight this illness,” Oliveira said when he was hospitalised. It was not to be. He went into coma and was dead within six days.
Three enterprising women in Argentina say that after that 2011 shock, they resolved to carry out the project to “honour (Oliveira’s) dying wish to change grey hospitals into warm and colourful places that can give hope.”
Art-in-hospital projects have sprung up round the world, driven by the belief that art can be a valuable tool, helping severely ill patients battle disease. Is art really curative? There is no evidence to back this, but what has been found is that people’s spirits rise when glum hospital walls are covered with paintings.
Over three years, the Argentine project has found artists to transform walls in eight hospitals, centres for the elderly and child foster-care homes. The first project they tackled was at the Alexander Fleming Oncological Hospital.
“We had an impressive response from artists. They donated over 150 works,” Andrea Schwirtz, an artist and one of the founders of “Art@hospital” told DPA.
“We are not art curators. We receive all paintings and our idea is that for each work donated, we will find a spot for it somewhere in the hospital,” she said. “The place turns into something completely different, cheerier, with more light, it changes the way ill people and their relatives think,” she added.
The main idea is to place paintings in areas where patients and their loved ones spend a great deal of time, because the artworks “take their minds off their worries and lead to happier thoughts — cheer them up.”
Reactions to the paintings have been immediate: e-mails thanking the Art@hospital organisers, as well as new donations from patients and their families.
Later “Art@hospital” carried out a different project: painting 30 murals on the walls of the Maternity and Paediatrics Wing at Rivadavia Hospital in Buenos Aires.
“When you paint a painting you have no idea where it will end up. But with murals you create them right where they will be exhibited. You live and feel the place during the work. There is interaction with the space and people throughout the project,” muralist Silvia Barbero explained to DPA.
Barbero has also painted murals in Cuba, as part of an international muralist biennale. Working with another three artists, she transformed an enormous wall in the Saturnino Lora Provincial Hospital in the city of Santiago in eastern Cuba.
“Hospitals are usually gloomy places, sterile, not very personal. With a painting you are not going to change the illness, nor the hard work in the field of health, but you can generate a different effect, a kind of oasis, almost therapeutic,” she said.
Not all art works are adequate for a hospital. The idea is to use a harmonious palette of colours, pleasant, soothing. “We avoid violent or provocative subjects. There is a huge amount of resources to create a pleasant sensation, of wellbeing, that can transport you out of there, maybe only for a second.”
In order to paint the walls of the Marie Curie Oncological Hospital in Buenos Aires, the “Art@hospital” project created a collection of roses, the symbol used in the fight against breast cancer, a series in different colours and styles.
There are different theories about the influence of colours on mood. Chromotherapy or colour therapy is an alternative medicine system that posits that colours have curative powers and help patients overcome emotional distress and other illnesses.
According to colour therapy, orange is energising, blue is balancing, green provides tranquillity and hope, yellow sparks enthusiasm and trust.
“Any art discipline is therapeutic, because art appeals to the essence of the wellbeing of human beings, their emotions,” said Barbero. “And it is therapeutic both for the artist and the viewer,” she added.
Patients, physicians and nurses are all grateful for hospital art.
”Every day when we enter the hospital, it is amazing how the walls sing the music of art, sharing the good times and the bad times in our lives,” said one hospital director. —DPA