Use of art making in treating older patients with dementia.

A three-axis model provides a frame for organizing the interactions between medicine and the visual arts. Longitudinally, visual functioning is part of an individual’s life from infancy through old age. We learn about the world through visual stimuli from early on and we continuously receive, process, and produce visual information (e.g., in the process of nonverbal communication). We can think of the visual arts as a subset of all visual functioning.