Like many healthy servings of whole-grain existential crises, a friend’s mid-April Facebook post pinned itself to my bulletin board of self-doubt. My friend quoted Ursula Vernon, a freelance writer, who wrote:
If ONE MORE PERSON says “What if they’d medicated Van Gogh!?” I think I’m permitted to set things on fire. If they’d medicated Van Gogh, he’d either have painted twice as much, or he’d have been happy and unproductive. And you know what? Starry Night wasn’t worth a terrible price in human misery. It’s neat. It wasn’t worth it.
Sometimes I wonder if being an artist makes me jaded to ART. Because it’s not magic and it’s not mystical, it’s just paint or pixels. And it can do amazing things! But you don’t owe humanity to be miserable just so you can move paint around in interesting shapes. Jesus. Art is not some kind of Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas bargain where you agree to be miserable so everybody can go “oh! Neat!” for 5 minutes.
I remember staring at this text, at the dozens of “likes” and distinct absence of comments on this post. This was something on which I wanted to comment, but I knew that I would need some time. Even now, on a Tuesday afternoon, eviscerating a package of Twizzlers, I’m not all that sure how to begin. So I’ve looped a Disturbed song and I plan on listening to it until I can figure out a more eloquent way to say, “Please, sit the fuck down, Ms. Vernon.”
Admittedly, not all artists have sob-stories – but we’re not going to talk about those potpourri-douchebags. Let’s talk about the messed-up ones: these types can make messed-up art or happy art or any gradient in-between. I’m personally one of those messed-up – messed-up types. And it was through reflecting on my artwork that I realized maybe I wasn’t as okay as I was pretending to be.
A little less than a year ago, I was diagnosed with Dysthymia – a less melancholy cousin to Depression, but still one hell of an ovary-buster. At best, this is the only “prize” on my Life Lotto Card, though I’ve still got a lot more scratching to do.
I’d first noticed that something was up –or rather, not –when I was, you know, crying uncontrollably multiple times a week. But in addition to that, my insecurities started pouring out in short, visceral poems –I’d started finding words to describe it. It – the sadness.
Put bluntly: art therapy.
And guess what? When my art stems from mental health, it is not for you. When I find myself at a low-point, I’m thinking about my paints, my pencils, my word choice, and how to tell a story – I could not give a donkey’s left nut what someone else besides me thinks of my art. Art is so confusingly selfish and selfless at the same time. It is how I say “Listen”; it is how I say “See me: witness”. It is the voice I have shaped like a blade on a leather strop. My art is an extension of myself –to quote Sweeney Todd: “At last, my right arm is complete!”
Ursula Vernon’s comment that art isn’t worth the “terrible price of human misery” opposes all emotions and experiences that do not revel in happiness and joy. I am sick and tired of the taboo against expressing a gradient of unfavorable emotions in public. The misery is already there: art is simply an outlet for letting the wound breathe.
The erasure of mental illness through denying its useful contributions [i.e. art] to society is nothing short of ableism. Society doesn’t encourage the mentally ill to stay ill for the sake of producing pretty pictures – Society barely believes that mental illness exists. My art gives me a voice to ensure that I do not isolate myself and suffer in silence.
Remember my Dysthymia? Trying to claw through the hordes of cringe-worthy childhood memories to find the root of this rotting tree takes me back to when I was around twelve years old. That’s very nearly a decade of a stiff upper-lip and academy-award-winning denial. My mental turmoil was typically only found in my art. Until I finally thought to start seeking professional help, my paintings, drawings, novels, and poems were how I survived. And yet, if I had the choice to not have this heavy sadness, I do not think that I would take it.
Now maybe that’s the masochist in me.
But I don’t know how much lesser of a person I would be without these artistic revelations. My poems are mantras to calm me when counting back from ten doesn’t cut it; drawing a human face helps me feel less lonely. And it’s very hard to tell where my mental illness ends and my art begins. We can’t and shouldn’t separate the artist from the art – what is this, New Criticism?
Mental illness is a lens through which I see this world. I am okay with the notion that it may be unrealistically dismal. I am okay in knowing that I do not necessarily have a choice in taking off this lens. I am okay with what I have felt because of my sadness, what I have done because of my sadness. And I am not sorry.
Accepting my mental illness is essential to coping and overcoming it. When I think of treating mental illness, I think of putting a rug over a stain in the carpet: visually, no one else may ever know that the stain is there, but as the homeowner, I know. I know what food or drink or child made it. I know how much money I spent on the cleaners. I know how I found a way to accept it. Now, the rug is a part of this room. And this room is a part of this house – my mental illness is a part of who I am as much as my being White or American or Female or a Future English-Teacher.
To say that Van Gogh’s Starry Night wasn’t worth the price of his mental illness is to call in a bulldozer and a wrecking ball. It is to buy a new house because something was wrong with the old one.
Mental illness and art created from mental illness are not aspects of a person to be gutted – they’re aspects to be remodeled at the homeowner’s discretion.
The purpose of Art is to express and to connect. Even if we were to disregard Van Gogh’s appreciation of his Starry Night, we can’t dismiss the impact that this piece has had on the world, or the impact of all art created by those who suffer from mental illness. Every sad song recorded or breakup poem penned serves a purpose. Art that comments on suffering and sadness is a necessity to the world, as much as the contributions of overworked scientists or exhausted mothers.
Martin McDonagh, in his play The Pillowman, has his protagonist [Katurian] explain to his younger brother [Michal] what might happen to the two of them and the protagonist’s writing in a totalitarian world:
If they [the police] came to me right now and said, ‘We’re going to burn two out of three of you –you, your brother, or your stories’, I’d have them burn you first, I’d have them burn me second, and I’d have it be the stories they saved.
The destruction of the artwork is equal to the destruction of the artist. My artwork is my fucking child in a burning building: I would run into it to save her.
Cam Best is a in-the-middle-of-a-quarter-
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