VISUAL ART IN APHASIA THERAPY: THE LOST AND FOUND SELF

Recently, the relationship between visual art and brain function and disease has raised considerable interest among neurologists, neuroscientists, and artists themselves. Visual art production involves multiple processes including basic motor skills, such as the coordination of movements, visual-spatial processing, emotional output, a socio-cultural context, as well as obviously creativity. Thus, the relationship between artistic output and brain diseases is particularly complex, and brain disorders may lead to an impairment of artistic production in multiple domains. Understanding the nature of aphasia, which leads to significant changes in human life in the physical, psychological, social and professional sphere, makes us aware of the importance of the individual (objective and subjective) and the social (collective and cultural) self system in the process of creation, especially in artists. Observing the works of artists with aphasia, we notice that each of them perceives the surrounding world differently. One wonders what makes them present reality in one way and not in another. It is true that all works of art show reality in thousands of different ways, and only an unoriginal artist will employ someone else's vision - one already used in a work. It should not be forgotten, however, that the work of artists with aphasia often takes on features resulting from the nature of the problems they face and is initially unoriginal, as they have to overcome fundamental technical difficulties and problems of technique. In this article, we present the possibilities for rehabilitation, of strengthening artists with aphasia, in order for them to find the self lost as a result of illness.