On the other hand Renoir paints happy images full of color, and his images became even brighter and more colorful as he aged and the very act of painting grew physically painful due to rheumatoid arthritis.Recently, an article on Marlene Dumas’s exhibition at MoMA remarked that for someone whose subjects are so dark, the artist is cheerful to the point of bubbly.I offer examplesof a paradox: unhappy people produce happy art, and happy people produce unhappy art. The unhappies desperately need to salvage some remnant of hope, and the happies need to dig into their lightly-held worries for material to create. Does that mean unhappy people find the creative process blissful, and happy ones find it torture? Certainly, one can’t equate the emotion felt by the artist while producing and the emotion sensed by the viewer of the product.
A Painful Creative Process?
Caravaggio
‘Artist suffer to produce art’ was the opening premise of my post yesterday. Somehow the creative process is one of “cracking your skull open” or “putting your sweat and blood into it.” “Tortured artist” even gets a page on Wikipedia, and is linked to the similar ‘poète maudit,’ the bad-boy artist who is against the establishment. In a way, societies finds tortured artistic personalities moving in the most Romantic way, because they feel a deep connection to this other person.
Vincent VanGogh
This all may be true to an extant, but I’m a little skeptic. Both the Romantic I of lyric poetry and the Romantic artist struggling to produce art are flawed characterizations. This emotional ethos en-nobilizes the making of art from a craft to fine art, with the by-product of considering the piece of work to reflect the soul of its creator. I think you’re as likely to see a reflection of your own soul as you are that of the artist.Charles Baudelaire
Making art is suffering as much as making anything else is. It could take the same amount of work, in terms of energy expelled and time, to make a table as a painting. Going to work is often not fun, but do I really get to claim that I suffer as I email and answer the phone? Running on a treadmill might be considered suffering, but nobody will idolize your soul over it.
Making art is suffering as much as making anything else is. It could take the same amount of work, in terms of energy expelled and time, to make a table as a painting. Going to work is often not fun, but do I really get to claim that I suffer as I email and answer the phone? Running on a treadmill might be considered suffering, but nobody will idolize your soul over it.
Robert Mapplethorpe
Also, don’t happy people create, and why shouldn’t they create good art? Leonardo is generally upheld as a great artist. He is also widely considered a brilliant thinker–yet he didn’t brood over his canvases. Hell, he could hardly be coerced to finish them once he had sketched them out, much less pour a troubled soul into them.
Suffering for Art
Artists get credit for suffering for art, but what about the viewers?
I sat watching a play, in the leftmost corner of the gallery where a chilly draft plagued me, for over 2 hours. It wasn’t torture to be cold, and an angle that wouldn’t suffice for TV watching or Internet surfing was somehow worthwhile for the stage. At the end of the play, like a bunch of trained monkeys, everyone watching hit their hands together to make a slapping sound. Why do we clap? How is it more civilized than howls or stomping? It signifies our enjoyment, but what is this quality of aesthetic enjoyment–this dreamy break from reality that takes on the guise of reality? Why is a simulacrum of reality more pleasurable to watch than the thing itself?
Aesthetic expereince, whether it’s a play or a painting, is a combination of cultural expectations and an innate human need to image. While we may frame our experiences with a stage or strips of wood to set something off as art, art moves us in a very innate way. So then we express our reaction by hitting our palms together…?
We are a strange animal.