00II of potential hindrances to our creative development still continuing…

Several months ago, I had an 11 year old student who declared, “I’m not crazy enough to be an artist.”

He admitted that this standpoint came from his knowledge of Vincent van Gogh and, specifically, the artist’s ‘ear incident’ which he understood as: “He cut his ear off when he went insane because of a woman.” I’m not here to unpack all of such myths around van Gogh and, thankfully, Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith have recently done an excellent job publishing the most comprehensive account of the artist’s life. You may want to clear up your own supposals about Vincent by checking out their book, Van Gogh: The Life. What I would like to ever-so-briefly approach (there are full-on books out there on this stuff) is the prevailing provocative image of the suffering artist and how the darker aspects of our experience influence our creative expression.

So, what is up with the strong affiliation between a perceived madness/melancholy/suffering and creativity? Is unwieldy or prominent hair a prerequisite? Are you concerned that you haven’t had enough strife or distress to access your spark?

I’d like to turn back to the research of Frank Barron, who I mentioned in part 1 of this chapter. In addition to ruling out the importance of IQ in our creative capacity, Barron found that the creative individual “is at once naive and knowledgeable…both more primitive and more cultured, more destructive and more constructive, occasionally crazier and, yet, adamantly saner than the average person.” Although his subjects scored high on tests with characteristics that society may associate with mental illness, they scored just as high on all measures of psychological health. How can this be? It seems that individuals who express themselves creatively tend to be more introspective. And being more in touch with their inner selves includes being more familiar with their darker aspects. Their ability to openly and boldly confront the spectrum of themselves lends to a capability to engage with the world as a full complex array of elements, forces, what-ifs, what-have-yous etc. This capacity allows for a natural acceptance of contradiction and disorder- to be comfortable with opposites occurring simultaneously, including positive and negative aspects. All of this is to say that creativity is more of an attitude that says yes to all that life has to offer; an attitude that has a far greater range of possibility to explore.

My favourite author, Haruki Murakami, once shared in a speech:

Haruki Murakami & vinyl collection.

“At times we tend to avert our eyes from the shadow, those negative parts. Or else try to forcibly eliminate those aspects. Because people want to avoid, as much as possible, looking at their own dark sides, their negative qualities. But in order for a statue to appear solid and three-dimensional, you need to have shadows. Do away with shadows and all you end up with is a flat illusion. Light that doesn’t generate shadows is not true light. […] You have to patiently learn to live together with your shadow. And carefully observe the darkness that resides within you.”

Now on some level it may seem like I am just re-constructing the popular belief that great art and invention must come from a dark side. What I am really attempting, though, is to begin dissolving this presumption by underscoring how each of us is a fluid living spectrum of varying tones of gleams and glooms. As Murakami puts it– “Light that doesn’t generate shadows is not true light” and we could also say that true shadows depend on the light– yes?

Most of us have learned to edit our inner spectrum. We have to admit that our culture’s standards and definitions of sane behaviour is a powerful influence. Many of the (identified) creative people who have been dubbed ‘crazy’ (a term that really is dismissive and prejudice in any context) may seem erratic or out of balance (and sometimes have untamed hair) but they may just be less preoccupied with norms and the opinions of others; perhaps they are not concerned with editing their impulses and inner experience to suit society’s cozy uniform sensibility.

While we are forcefully encouraged to be happy all of the time, on some level we all feel how ridiculous (and repressive) that is. We may think we’ve got to suffer a whole lot to tap our creative spark but it’s not something we need to shop for; I don’t know if we need to go out and get pained (although we could benefit from some risks). We all inevitably experience and process physical and emotional pain in a unique way and there’s no actual method to accurately judge pain from the surface–some people mourn the death of a pet far more deeply than the loss of a parent. We cannot even measurably describe our pain to anyone; no matter what we say in words, there’s no way for anyone else to know precisely what we are feeling. So what do we do with that?

I’ll need to continue this in the next article…

I do what I’m feeling and what I’m feeling is monstrous. And I do it in the nicest possible way.

-KARA WALKER