Janie Paul on Michigan Radio

Stamps Professor Janie Paul was featured in a May 27 Michigan Radio story on the rise in popularity of coloring books for adults. 

“When we’re little we all scribble and make shapes and color. It’s a primal experience. It’s about satisfying a need to make mark on a surface, to assert that I have acted on the world,” Paul said.
She also says we spend so much time every day being passive and doing things like receiving emails and watching TV and movies. In short, we’re over-stimulated.
But Paul says making art is the opposite of that. ​“Art is generative. It comes from inside of us and so it connects us back to ourselves and affirms who we are.”
Paul says that can happen when you sit down quietly with a coloring book, open it up and begin shading in the shapes and forms.

Coloring books help adults find their happy place | Michigan Radio