Raw Art
Where thick, charcoal arms reach out to sheets of water color, and acrylic clings to its canvas; where fingers make quick stabs at keys and clutch onto pencils, creating words flowing into rivers across the page, you’ll find the brain of an artist and writer. Look at Jean Dubuffet’s collection de l’Art Brut, which translates to “raw art”—art that has not been influenced by culture or already established art styles (“Art and Schizophrenia: A Window into Other Realities”)—and look carefully, peel away the paint and rip aside the paper, just enough so your eyes can graze the other side of the frame. You’ll be shocked, and not by the talent reflected in the work. Over half of the lives behind these pieces of art have been painted with the color of a mental illness (“Art and Schizophrenia: A Window into Other Realities”). Could some people be wired to have the creativity but only in a thick mixture with mild psychosis? Maybe creativity and madness overlap each other, the traits too similar. Yet, despite the various debates and theories, research strongly supports that mild forms of mental illness do contribute to creativity.
But creativity and mental disorders do not tie together by one definite link. The separation between normality, mild psychosis, and plain mania is thin. So, how do we know when we’ve fallen or can no longer keep balance? The judgment becomes a scale, called the “continuum theory.” A person can be mentally healthy yet still have schizotypal traits or be bipolar with very few symptoms. The artistic abilities embed themselves in only the mild part of the spectrum; otherwise, the severity of the illness would prevent creation. Creativity ventures into the chaotic waters, feeding off the frenzy, but leaving when the current threatens to drown (Dobson).
Art can depict a meaning deeper than reality, invisible to most people. In schizophrenia, fabrication and actuality can tangle, fading in and out of each other. The slight detachment from the earth, the crashing back down, the open mindedness and flexibility, and the impulsiveness can create remarkable things through the odd thought process brought to some at the price of a mental illness (Dobson, Professor Gordon Claridge). Bipolar and depressive qualities also translate into art. The spirituality, empathy, and realism that often come along with the trauma and mood swings can enhance an artist’s creative abilities just as well as mild schizophrenia can (Czyzewski).
So, there sits an artist and writer, eyes murky from paint and reflecting cramped letters of a story. The artists can only see the spinning thoughts in front of their faces. Subconsciously, both the writer and the artist lightly bite the ends of their utensils, letting the lead from the paint and pencils seep into their systems. Could have exposure to toxic materials been an early start to psychosis in artists? Lead poisoning can skew your vision, causing halos and light to materialize around objects. Many researchers believe this inspired Vincent van Gogh’s Starry Night (Stapleton). Today, these supplies rarely contain lead, but possibly the craziness might already be embedded in our DNA. Similarly, the cause of madness in hatters, such as in Alice in Wonderland, was from the mercury used to repair hats (Stranger). Does the madness come from generations of careless habits?
Both Albert Einstein and James Joyce where mentally healthy, but their children later developed schizophrenia (“Art and Schizophrenia: A Window into Other Realities”). So, why did their children and not Einstein and Joyce themselves? Were they lucky enough to pluck out the right combination of genes, and their children unfortunate enough to get the leftovers or environmental triggers? Research at Stanford University shows that grad students in the more artistic disciplines share more traits with bipolar psychiatric patients than their other peers did (Parker-Pope).
This serves as proof that something crawls in our DNA, causing creativity to spiral naturally with mild psychosis. A mutation of a gene involved in brain development called Neuregulin 1 could be what forces the fingers of artistic talent and mental illness to intertwine. Researcher Szabolcs Keri found in his study that those with two copies of Neuregulin 1 scored considerably higher on his devised test of creativity than those with one or none (Callaway). But in the study, while it supported a connection between the gene and creativity, those with the mutation were no more likely to have schizotypal traits than those without. Keri theorizes that the mutation can cause a dampening effect in the brain region responsible for mood and behavior, called the prefrontal cortex. This could, figuratively, cause the watery emotion to whirlpool, spill over the edge, and pull mild psychosis through its volatile waves. Somehow, these “defects and malfunctions” have stayed; proving to be beneficial despite the pain and suffering otherwise, natural selection would have scrubbed our brains to shiny cleanliness long ago.
Yet, if evolution had picked up the soap and sponge so many things would never have been. The legacy and works of Edvard Munch, Vincent van Gogh, Virginia Woolf, Jackson Pollock, and Sylvia Plath would neither exist nor be the same thing we see today. The anger, the anxiety, the happiness, and the tears that often become the focus of bipolar and depressive artists would not surge through the art in the same way (“Art and Schizophrenia: A Window into Other Realities”). The dark shadows that danced between the letters of many of Sylvia Plath’s poems came from the depression which festered at the bottom of her skull. Even before her diagnosis, she could never shake the hollow isolation and shifting emotions (Cooper). Yet, schizophrenic art sways further, becoming distant and tending to be more intellectual (“Art and Schizophrenia: A Window into Other Realities”). Artist such as Martin Ramirez, Louis Wain, and Vincent van Gogh found some sort of connection to reality in their work even when others eyes weren’t able to flip the image right-side up. Vincent van Gogh strived for realism, but the farther he ran through his life, the more the world started to look like hazy lethargy. He had a virulent amount of illnesses, such as thujone (a toxin in absinthe) poisoning, which can cause color distortion, and acute porphyria, a hereditary disease than can make confusion and hallucinations shoot through your veins, piercing your mind (Stapleton).
Socrates, who dismissed any poet “untouched by the madness of the muses,” once said: “...Sane compositions never reach perfection, but are utterly eclipsed by the inspired madman,” (Stranger). Could the “mad genius” be a stereotype carried over from theories as old as Ancient Greece? Harvard Professor Albert Rothenberg says studies on the relations between mental disorders and creativity are flawed (“Creativity & Mental Illness”). Diagnosed with schizophrenia in the 1930’s, artist Martin Ramirez’s work seemed like generally colorless chaos. But something sane hides in the odd pictures he drew in the epicenter of strange little earthquakes—line after line wavering and rolling after each other. Ramirez was not afraid of leaving extra space on the canvas, as most schizophrenic artist’s are (Parker-Pope). His art might not have been about the insanity inside his head. Considering that he worked both in a studio and while inside a mental institution, he might have used the constant repetition of lines to soothe himself instead of to express his innermost feelings.
Or the chain linking mental illness to creativity could be something drawn and embellished purely by artistic children as an answer, but not a solution, to their differences and low-self esteem. “Artistic children often do not have as many venues to shine, and to gain self esteem, as other children. They see themselves as different, as an artist. The notion that craziness is an important aspect of being an artist, and that craziness makes you a better artist, affects them,” explains University of the Arts mental health counselor Annie Hagert (Stranger). Something fixates readers’ eyes and pulls at an art-enthusiast’s stare when a book or picture has clearly been fueled by delicate, eggshell emotions, but there is nothing visionary about suicide, mental illness, addiction, and substance abuse. Though, once we get stuck in this perpetual motion, it becomes harder to silence and even more difficult to want to. Bipolar and depressive artists sometimes report a drop in creativity when medicated, while medication doesn’t seem to affect schizophrenics’ inspirations (“Art and Schizophrenia: A Window into Other Realities”). Because of this, Edvard Munch refused treatment, considering his emotional torments “part of me and my art,” and feared that tinkering with his mind would rearrange the gears, stopping the creativity from turning (Stranger). Artists do not choose to have a mental illness just as someone does not chooses to have cancer, but the question “how do you be interesting and creative and not hurt yourself” becomes hard to answer (Stranger, Annie Hagert). When you don’t have a response, it turns into a strangling decision to recover, go into therapy, take the pills, and walk the hallways of a hospital.
You pace between rooms and down hallways, but it’s not enough. The people who made this place forgot to add room for what they can’t see. The bare walls in your room are actually bursting, decorated with the things that swim inside your head and do tricks within your eyes. Mental hospitals need a way to create the extra space they can’t build. “My clinical experience is that high-IQ people with mild psychosis have more intellectual capacity to deal with psychotic experiences,” Keri says, “it’s not enough to experience those feelings, you have to communicate them,” (Callaway). Art has proven to be the solution to knocking down the walls. We’ve been told many times that we need creative outlets to express our emotions by parents and paint-splattered art teachers, and actually, most institutions use art therapy for their patients.
Comedians also use these skills in their career. You listen to their jokes and laugh, but give back the joke that just rolled through your ears and take away the stage. You won’t find the comedian. In a study of 69 successful comedians, reported psychologist Rod Martin, most volunteers tended to be highly intelligent, angry, suspicious, and depressed (Dobson). A theory suggests that humor can be a coping mechanism, a way to drown out the depression so you can’t hear suffering and anxiety over the laughter. Art, despite its reputation for holding hands with mild psychosis, can also be a relief, almost a temporary cure for mental illnesses.
So, why does the same thing that imprisons a person’s brain also spin countless threads of brilliance? The answer is indefinite, thousands of theories and studies, but also infinite. Yet, even though the lives of many artists’ have been colored in with mild psychosis, they have not been defined by it. They can place all of their possible futures in a line, and an artist will always be one of them, but not one who is mentally ill. Madness does not cause creativity to detonate; it only pushes it a little further, adding emotion and distance that sets it apart from the rest. So, try to find the ability to stay on the ground even with the constant gnawing at your mind. It gets hard, especially when you reach a point where your art starts to float away. “When you are insane, you are busy being insane—all the time…” (Stranger, Sylvia Plath). We watch the moon cycle, mesmerized, but no one actually wants a mind that continuously and uncontrollably waxes and wanes.
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