Tortured soul or a fulfilled, self actualised being? Lisette Kaleveld explores the paradox of the artistic temperament.

Stereotypically speaking

The myth of the crazed creative spans all art forms and mental illnesses, from anxious writer Franz Kafka, to the moody pianist David Helfgott and the fabulously aloof and narcissistic pop artist Andy Warhol.

As much as we love the Jackson Pollock, Vincent van Gogh and Pablo Picasso paintings, we also treasure the disturbed lives and souls of their creators. Virginia Woolf is as famous for being depressed and difficult as she is for Mrs Dalloway. And Sylvia Plath's Pulitzer Prize winning poetry seems just a footnote to her widely discussed suicide and dysfunctional intimacy with Ted Hughes.

Artists aren't the only public figures known for going off the rails. But more than politicians, more than corporate bosses, scientists, inventors and religious leaders, high profile artists attract intense scrutiny of their dysfunction. Perhaps it's that they trade in emotional truths, and we feel an intimacy with their inner lives. Whether it's Joni Mitchell's haunting melodies (and lyrics like "I am a lonely painter..."), or the jazz blues notes of Nina Simone and her throat full of suffering and wonder and song, great art involves an intermingling of pain and joy that is so personal it's transpersonal. "And now I mean every word of it," Nina Simone once told her audience during a live performance of "Mississippi Goddam". And we don't doubt her for a minute.

Yet there's something misleading, even irritating, about the stereotype of the tortured artist. Writer Elizabeth Wurtzel wonders whether it's our culture's attempt to invent a medicine man for our emotional lives. She asks: do we see the artist as a shaman who suffers so we don't have to? (1)

As someone who takes art classes just for fun, the creative process for me involves just a peaceful, easy feeling, a kind of centeredness. And I see nothing extraordinary about the professional artists I know personally. Like other people they work hard, keep a tidy house, laugh at themselves and aren't averse to good times. They are earthy, knowledgeable and their lives show that, contrary to popular belief, being artistic doesn't mean struggling always with inner conflict and pain.

In fact, according to Abraham Maslow's hierarchy of needs – where humans move towards their highest potential as the physical, social and spiritual needs are met – creativity is the sign of self actualisation, something that the most fulfilled and healthy people enjoy.

So why would art come to be associated with angst? Art therapist Tessa Dalley believes we rely so much on verbal messages that communication through imagery and symbols is seen as obscure, even mystical. People lack confidence in understanding art's meaning, so it's glorified and feared. "The ambiguity of art in general places it at a tangent, detached from the mainstream of communication...Because of this, art and artists easily generate stereotypes," she says. (2)

Freud, on art

Our culture's most influential psychoanalyst, Sigmund Freud, wasn't at all kind to the arts (despite his son Ernst being an artist and architect). Freud once described art as the sublime form of playing with one's excrement, and his theories helped link pathology to the artistic drive.

For Freud, there were “secondary thought processes” of verbal, rational and analytic thought and “primary processes”, imaginative, symbolic and non verbal, which he associated with regression, neurosis and ill health. Art critic Peter Fuller says Freud "was thus never entirely able to free himself from the view that art was on the side of illness – or, at best, an uneasy defence against it." (3)

Freud was challenged by psychoanalyst Carl Jung who found in art evidence, not of psychopathology and neurosis, but of what he called the Self, that centre of human wholeness (4). But Freud's theory had on its side the weight of an industrial society and culture that privileged rational thinking, while marginalising the production of art. The unfortunate result is, writes Fuller, that most of us "lack contact with creative processes and their restorative powers."

But thinking is, as always, changing. Psychoanalysts now believe both rational and imaginative processes are equally adaptive and necessary for health and happiness. Developmental psychologists say children start drawing spontaneously at 18 months and, for anthropologists, art is indigenous to all societies, and as natural to human life as breathing. In medicine, the link between creativity and healing is now well documented. Journalling is even thought to help patients overcome cancer and autoimmune disease. And although a long list of high profile, disturbed artists make “art therapy” seem a contradiction in terms, the practice has been gaining credibility since the 1940s.

Interior silence, the art of stillness

Thinking about art has taken on a different shape and form in Eastern cultures, which are notable for their highly proficient approach to exploring and mastering the inner life. Unlike the Western idea of artist as anguished soul, Eastern philosophy views artists as spiritual teachers, a claim made also by Kandinsky.

Japanese thinking about art is aligned with the idea of self cultivation. Japanese arts – pottery, the tea ceremony, flower arranging, calligraphy, martial arts – are literally seen as a pathway to deep transformation, if not enlightenment. Practised by all people, regularly, the arts in Japan focus the mind, unify the heart and body and lead an individual to realise their divine potential. Religion, philosophy, aesthetics, culture, and ethics are all interconnected here (5).

In Japan, a Zen Buddhist artist will meditate on where to mark the paper in order to achieve a perfect sense of stillness and balance in the composition, to calm and quieten rather than unsettle or stimulate the viewer.

Of course, “art” is the most elastic of concepts. Zen Buddhist Japanese art is a world away conceptually from elite Western art which strives always for that “wow” factor or shock response. Contemporary gallery art can be cerebral, political, detached and alienating. Artists of our time provoke and satirise. They do strange or disturbing things that make us attentive to life, or the emotional lives of others. Or produce incomprehensible forms, the Emperor's New Clothes, which is all part of the game and the enjoyment.

But the Japanese approach to the arts reminds us of the importance of giving art a life outside galleries, in the studios and hands of ordinary people.

Art outside the gallery

Since the opening of the first art museum, the Louvre in Paris, art in Western thought has tended to be elite and marginal, and heavily over-intellectualised.

But there are signs art can be re-integrated into our everyday lives. The internet has opened up new creative outlets for non-discipline based art forms (web authoring, social networking, games and blogging). Artist and curator Melinda Rackham notes, "Networked space has enabled artists to mutate journaling with visual photographic and video traditions into an emergent interactive art form." (6)

In 1999, New York's Bust magazine editor Debbie Stoller founded the knitting group Stitch and Bitch. Before long, forgotten handicrafts were being practised all over the world. "I began seeing women – young women – knitting on the subway. Soon they were everywhere: at coffee shops, on lunch lines, at the movies, even in bars," Stoller says (7).

This trend resembles art's place in pre-industrial times, as an unglorified practice, that everyday thing that connects us with fabrics and wood, stones, colours and clay, sound and movement. It's a tactile pleasure that maybe as a culture we've forgotten.

"Thought alone doesn't interest me. Photography is a manual labour: you have to move, to shift," said Henri Cartier-Bresson, a Buddhist photojournalist and one of the most influential photographers of the last century. He says: "My problem is to be in my life. To seize the moment in its fullness....The body and the spirit should add up to one only." (8)

Cartier-Bresson travelled everywhere – "carrying the lightest baggage," Gerard Mace once said of him. "The lightest baggage is that old lesson which can't be learned, but which accompanies us everywhere once we understand it. It has enabled Henri...to remove himself as a person, to disappear in order to capture the instant...the shape of destiny in the clouds, and smoke of India in a peacock fanning its tail." (9)

It seems art is a matter of alignment – Cartier-Bresson says it's about putting "one's head, one's eye, and one's heart on the same axis," and Australian painter Guan Wei describes using "the trifecta of wisdom, knowledge and humour in every painting." (10)

Art as illumination

In my picture of the world there is a vast outer realm and an equally vast inner realm; between these two stands man, facing now one and now the other, and, according to his mood or disposition, taking the one for the absolute truth by denying or sacrificing the other – CG Jung (11)

If the light of reason cannot reach everywhere, then art is the other great illuminator. Art captures that which is difficult to grasp, like paradox, the Mona Lisa smile, the surrealist dreamscapes such as Paul Delvaux's moonlit scene in “Les Adieux”, or Salvador Dali's absurd worlds that nonetheless have resonance and a strange familiarity.

Art is home to non-dualistic awareness and primordial symbols, the beauty of Indigenous painter Paddy Bedford's compositions, those simple shapes with a surprising power. Art is the ability of Mark Rothko to paint canvasses full of nothingness and express emotion with an exactness that's impossible to describe in words.

Art is non-verbal communication that reaches across cultures and through history, reducing distance between ourselves and others. It's neither subjective nor objective knowledge, but an intermingling of both. It's the personal plus something larger. It's Thales' idea that “all things are full of gods” or the Zen notion of the big mind and suchness. It's a proper, almost yogic, alignment of heart, mind and body. Art is to the soul what reason is to the mind. The shamans knew it as a tool for exploring the inner life, a great vastness – and as someone once said to me, "If you were to document every emotion, every sense and feeling you have, you'd be astonished by how rich your life is."

References:
1. Wurtzel, Elizabeth 1999 Bitch, In Praise of Difficult Women, Quartet Books Ltd: Great Britain.
2. Dalley, Tessa (ed) 1984 Art as Therapy: An Introduction to the Use of Art as a Therapeutic Technique, Tavistock Publications: London.
3. Fuller, Peter 1984 Foreword, in Art as Therapy: An Introduction to the Use of Art as a Therapeutic Technique, Tavistock Publications: London, pp. ix - x.
4. Robinson, Martin 1984 A Jungian approach to art therapy based in a residential setting in Art as Therapy: An Introduction to the Use of Art as a Therapeutic Technique, Tavistock Publications: London, pp. 82-95.
5. Carter, Robert 2008 The Japanese Arts and Self-Cultivation, State University of New York Press: New York.
6. Rackham, Melinda 2005 in 2004 A Collaboration Between Centre for the Moving Image and the NGV, National Gallery of Victoria/Woodstocker Books: Melbourne.
7. Woodcock, Victoria 2006 Introduction in Making Stuff: An Alternative Craft Book, Black Dog Publishing, London.
8. Mace, Gerard,1999 Afterword in Henri Cartier-Bresson, The Mind's Eye, Writings on Photography and Photographers, Aperture: New York.
9. Cartier-Bresson, Henri 1999 The Mind's Eye, Writings on Photography and Photographers, Aperture: New York.
10. 2005 2004 a collaboration between centre for the moving image and the NGV, National Gallery of Victoria Woodstocker Books: Melbourne.
11. Jung, C.G 1933 Modern Man in Search of a Soul Routledge and Kegan Paul: London.