What makes you happy?

What has made you happy lately? This book is about happiness and what makes people happy. By focusing and studying happiness throughout this project I hope to cultivate this emotion and become happier myself. I hope to break the “tortured artist” stereotype and create powerful and interesting work that comes from positive feelings, and by doing this I hope to make other people happy too… even if it’s just a little. This was part of my masters project. It explored what makes people happy. Usually, when people think about happiness things like winning the lottery, job promotions, the birth of a child etc come to mind. However, when I prompted my family and friends to think about what has made them happy lately their responses weren’t huge accomplishments or once in a lifetime events, they were simple day to day activities, things that happened by chance or simply the people and things that surround them. I believe it is more difficult to make touching and relatable art about happiness than it is to make it about grief and other negative emotions. That is why after the pandemic, I wanted to try to make colourful, bright, and happy artwork that people can hopefully relate to, as I felt there was enough grief to go around at the time. This project made me realise there is so many things to be happy about, as insignificant as they seem they surround us and we tend to take them for granted. “It's so hard to forget pain, but it's even harder to remember sweetness. We have no scar to show for happiness. We learn so little from peace.” ― Chuck Palahniuk, Diary