Rolf Harris will be leading hundreds of professional and amateur artists as they aim to recreate John Constable’s The Hay Wain on a giant scale. He believed that drawing is as essential to life as reading or writing. It was made last year as part of The Big Draw, a series of public drawing events and competitions. The annual project is organised by the Campaign for Drawing, which was set up in 2000 by the Guild of St George, a small charity, to celebrate the centenary of the death of its founder, the artist, art critic and social reformer John Ruskin. “One of the benefits of drawing is that it heightens perception and aids communication. Often while we are drawing we are not making eye contact, and people come up with all sorts of ideas and queries that they probably wouldn’t bring up in a group or face to face. It’s really quite interesting what people tell me while they are drawing.

Adults, for example, talk about all sorts of problems that they would be too embarrassed to discuss if they were making eye contact with you.”During her sessions, clients have helped produce the biggest drawing in the world on an 11m sheet of lining paper. Topics include healthy eating, fitness and exercise, sun safety, smoking and drugs. “By drawing things, people remember more and they are interacting with the subject matter,” she says. It’s also very social, so it’s enjoyable.”Art is also being used as a tool for maintaining good health.

Heather O’Neill, a nurse and health visitor with a degree in fine art, who is employed by Croydon Primary Care Trust, encourages people to draw during the health promotion workshops she runs for playgroups, nurseries, women’s groups, family centres, play schemes and adults with learning disabilities. The picture provides the bridge to be able to talk about it.”Artists, rather than art therapists, have been working with specific patient groups at East Sussex Hospitals NHS Trust for the last 10 years. This year, the trust’s Arts in Healthcare programme has been helping stroke patients and those in long-term chronic pain. “The big thing with strokes is to keep people active and stimulated to start repairing the damage done,” says Mary Hooper, who manages the programme. “The effect of any creative activity focuses your attention away from your illness and being in hospital, with its loss of identity and displacement.

That can be picked up by the art therapist and worked through. When working with people from disrupted social circumstances, refugees or people with a lost sense of cultural identity, the drawing of a landscape can very quickly take them back to their country of origin. “Images precede the capacity to put experience into thought and understanding, and the therapeutic aim of art therapy is to come to terms gradually with an experience that can’t yet be put into words. People say drawing in art therapy helps them to comprehend the as yet unknown.”During the weekly sessions, patients might produce anything from a range of seemingly incoherent marks to a full-blown landscape, but it is the process of drawing that is important, rather than the work produced.