If you’re reading this blog post, most likely you live on the blue planet as well and you need vitamin sea more than you think.
I’ve been living my whole childhood near water as I gazed through the window from my blue-decorated room filled with 4 aquariums at a time (yes, four!) and when I moved to a big, crowded, landlocked city I didn’t know what was missing, even as I had all the cognitive stimulation I craved for so long. Unfortunately, I still don’t live near water for reasons that I can’t fully control, but I schedule time to be around or in water as much as possible.
Blue spaces include any body of water such as a fountain, a hot spring, a pond, a lake, even a sea or an ocean if you live in a coastal area. Being near them for extended periods of time has several health benefits:
- You are more likely to walk if the space around you is beautiful, wide and open. If you walk more, you are less likely to mismanage your weight.
- You are likely to breath better from all the mist of a water environment, especially if you breathe in that salty sea breeze.
- Your mental health is likely to be better overall whether that is due to the sense of calm blue spaces induce when being around them or due to the increased rate of water-related activities such as swimming, surfing or sailing.
The impact of all these premium health benefits on humans describe the blue health effect and ever since I found a name for it, I not only took the liberty to go to the seaside more often, I also took this into consideration when creating my type of art: marine Ikebana poetry.
Here are the blue space effects I took into consideration while creating my art:
- I care about mental health preservation and improvement so I didn’t want my art to shock people or induce disgust. At most, I wanted it to make people reflect on things they may find uncomfortable, sometimes by using complex words, but the visual aspect should never be ugly or disgusting and the overall effect of my art should be to induce calmness. Hence when creating my compositions, I frequently used the golden ratio, lots of open spaces, the wabi sabi philosophy and I included a bit of blue in just about every visual poem I wrote and published.
- Not only that I used blue in all of my poems, but the designs themselves are inspired by the seaside, namely the Black Sea coastline which I go to so often. I can’t always stay overnight, but I often go there just to walk a couple of hours by the seaside, be it summer or winter, sunshine or rain or snow, I don’t care. Most of the seashells used in these visual poems were collected from the Black Sea, albeit a few of them were bought from Japan and elsewhere in Asia.
- The cleaner the water, the more intense the blue space effect can be. This is the reason for which I brainstormed a lot while soul searching in defining my type of art and a first solution I found was to manufacture everything as print on demand to avoid filling the world with unwanted books, art prints, home décor objects, merchandise or gifts. I already used this business model when releasing my previous three books on gerontology and this time, I wanted to try it in the art field as well.
- I don’t wish people spend even more time in front of their computers than they already do for work or leisure or both. Those short walks by the seaside I take are truly one of the rare cases when I’m truly offline and I get so refreshed not only from that fresh salty air, the exercise I get from walking a couple of hours, but also from all the new ideas I get. It is way too easy to be attracted by the digital realm and forget how to inhabit your body and reflect on life. Hence I took the decision to offer my creations as print only. Even if you can view or buy them online, you don’t have to spend time in front of a screen in order to enjoy the hardcover photo book series, the art prints or the homeware.
Some people may dream about reaching for the stars, but reaching for the seaside is good enough for me.
How about you?
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