Path to the Lake and Beyond

Posted by Meg Nola Jul 19, 2008

While visiting someone at Chicago’s Northwestern Memorial Hospital recently, I noticed a beautifully tranquil painting in the lobby. The 1999 work, Path to the Lake by Ben Whitehouse, is fairly large and at such an angle that you almost feel like you could climb into the scene and keep heading toward the water. And according to this ARTnews excerpt, the painting is a key example of the concept of healing art:

Soon, hospital patients may wake up from anesthesia to see images like Claude Monet's Argenteuil Basin or Ben Whitehouse's Path to the Lake. According to Dr. Roger Ulrich of Texas A&M University, patients who view art can recover more quickly, with lowered pain, anxiety, and blood pressure.

(Interestingly, abstract art was cited as making patients feel worse.) Even just as a visitor, though, I could sense that painting's calming effect -- and beyond that, it’s lured me back to see it again even though I had no other reason to be at the hospital anymore.

Whitehouse was born in England but works mostly in the United States, capturing landscape scenes in traditional and more innovative ways. He’s been compared to Alfred Sisley or William Merritt Chase, but there’s also a similarity to American Impressionist Willard Metcalf, through the keen attention to seasonal detail and sense of atmospheric tension. Whitehouse’s recent landscape interpretations involve consecutive digital video portraits, recording aspects of a scene over a 24 hour period, or one complete revolution of the earth.

Learn more about Ben Whitehouse here, and maybe even feel your own blood pressure drop a bit just by looking at the website version of Path to the Lake.