The Tortured Artist Myth
This post was inspired by an entry on Hazel Dooney’s excellent blog after I got cross at some of the comments insisting that artists should be crazed geniuses living wild lifestyles.
The Death of Chatterton, Henry Wallis, 1856
I HATE the myth of the tortured artist.
Why do we want the lives of our artists to be a spectacle?
‘Oh artists, please sweat blood and tears. Blow your brains out. Die young from a heroin overdose. Stick your head in a gas oven. Paint in a drunken rage. Live in squalor and poverty. We want to see you struggle, suffer and go mad – then we’ll know what you made was real and important.’
Or you could just, you know, look at the art they’ve made.
Ah, but where’s the fun in that? It’s so much more exciting when the artist kills themselves or dies tragically young!
Um, does anyone else have a problem with the inherent vileness of this attitude?
Suicide isn’t romantic; it’s a terrible thing that destroys families. Alcoholism isn’t glamorous; it’s an extremely unpleasant addiction. Poverty isn’t heroic; it’s boring and exhausting.* Mental illness may indeed help someone to access and release their creativity but it can just as easily cripple them with so much pain that making art becomes impossible.
My life probably looks rather dull from the outside. Yes, it has aspects that other people would undoubtedly consider bohemian but as a general rule, it’s pretty domestic and mundane. I like staying at home. I like gardening, knitting, plittering around online and cooking when the mood takes me. I get a bizarre satisfaction from filling up the freezer with homemade food. I like wandering around with my camera in my hand observing tiny moments of everyday beauty. I like talking to my family, petting the cat and going to bed with a big pile of books & my hot water bottle. These days chocolate is my major vice. Most days, I feel content and blessed with my safe and boring life.
And I don’t care if you’d rather have razor blades and drugs and wild orgies – too bloody bad. Sorry to disappoint. But I’m not here to serve as lurid entertainment; I’m here to make my art and I’ve chosen the most sustainable way for me to do that. Oddly enough, I care more about making my art than about someone else’s need for salacious excitement. If you want the later, go watch reality TV!
Of course, I wouldn’t say I was exactly normal – if I don’t make art regularly then I go into Mad Project Mode and you’ll find me reorganising all my cupboards at 3 am or peeling wallpaper off the walls! Living in a safe, comfortable place surrounded by people who love me and having a dull routine where I make art most days actually stops me sliding into the crazy and I like it that way because I get more art made. My art is not improved by letting my crazier aspects loose; all that happens is that I don’t sleep enough, I manically work myself into the ground and then I spiral into a Chronic Fatigue crash that stops me working for weeks or even months.
I had a more extreme ‘tortured artist’ lifestyle when I was younger. It was a lot of fun and I have no regrets but in the end, I found that sort of drama-filled way of living didn’t serve my art or my health. I used to live on adrenaline, particularly when doing exhibitions. I would leave things to the last minute so that I had to work like a crazed banshee. I definitely got an ‘art high’ from making art in a frenzy of all-nighters but I simply don’t have the energy for that way of working any more so I try to avoid it, even though I’m undoubtedly still wired that way.
And frankly, a lot of my last-minute art wasn’t as good as the art I made when I had more time. Sure, sometimes it was great- deadlines do focus the mind wonderfully – but often it wasn’t and when that was the case, there wasn’t time to fix it or make something better. Work made in a frenzy of passion is not intrinsically better or more ‘artistic’ than work made by plodding along – it’s just a more glamorous and seductive story.
Of course there’s still a place for the heroic in art. Just as there’s a place for the tortured genius, the rootless nomad who travels the world in search of inspiration, the debauched drunken artist who pees in the fireplace and the art prodigy who burns out and dies at 25. These things are just not a necessary ingredient for all artists – many of our great artists lived surprisingly boring lives.
Art is a very wide church and there’s room for all of us and our myriad ways of working and living. An artist who works best in tortured bursts of madness is no better or worse than an artist who gets to the studio at 9am and puts in an eight hour work day every single day of their lives: they’re just different people, with different needs and different ways of working. We do artists a huge disservice by insisting that ‘real’ artists must all conform to a stereotype of tortured genius.
That said, I’d never criticise anyone for following their muse into the wild dark places because I’ve travelled those roads and I know there’s beauty and art to be found there. If you are creatively energised by more extreme ways of living and working, then I genuinely hope you have an absolute blast and that your stamina holds out! If mine had, I’d probably still be working that way because I did enjoy it but it wasn’t any more noble, artistic or intrinsically valid than the way I work now.
……
Naturally, I’m not alone in discussing this subject:
Daniel Sroka, a regular commenter on this blog, dislikes the tortured artist myth.
Anna Williams feels the tortured artist myth also damages writers.
Artist, Megan Chapman acknowledges that the myth has some basis in reality.
Unsurprisingly, it’s all The Romantics fault!
* Edited to Add:
CopyCatFilms on Twitter felt I was judging poor people in this sentence. I’m not at all and I apologise if it read that way. I’ve been poor in the past and it absolutely sucks.
Yes, my life is nice now but it wasn’t always this way. I’ve been so poor that I’ve had to look down the back of the couch for pennies so that I could eat. I’ve been so poor that I knew exactly which order to pay the bills in and exactly how long I could leave it before a vital service was cut off. And in my experience, it wasn’t romantic or creative or fun, it was depressing and yes, boring. It was soul-numbingly, grindingly, depressingly tedious. Of course, your experience of poverty may vary – I had postnatal depression and was an overwhelmed and isolated single parent of a small child; no doubt this strongly coloured my experience.
Do I regret having been poor? No, I don’t. It taught me many valuable life skills, made me more compassionate towards those who are locked into generational poverty, showed me just how much middle class privilege I have always had (even though I was poor, I was educated and I knew I wouldn’t be poor forever) and how our life choices can spiral us into poverty. I certainly don’t regret the choice to keep my son, which was what temporarily sunk me into real poverty in the first place.
However, no longer being in a constant state of bio-survival anxiety makes it far easier for me to make art. I make more art than I did then because I have more support, both financial and emotional for my art now. I know that I’m extremely lucky to be where I am and believe me, I am constantly aware of this. And no, I have no desire to go back to living in a neighbourhood where the local children threw stones at my window and I cowered in my living room and wept with fear.
