One of the core principles they teach in advertising is to create a brand image out of the product you’re trying to sell. Once that image is ingrained in one’s mind, it’s impossible not to associate that item or product with the brand.
Similarly, once an artist is labelled the poster child for depressed folks, its hard not to think of their torment when you think of their product, aka, their art.
As soon as you read the phrase ‘Troubled Artist,’ one or another famous artist who has been branded by the media and society as such must’ve popped in your head. It is highly likely that that artist is dead and if so, it was by suicide or under mysterious circumstances.
For the sake of argument, here are a few famous names who met their demise in such a manner – Vincent Van Gogh, Elliott Smith, Robin Williams, Sylvia Plath, Kurt Cobain, Marilyn Monroe.
If your mind conjured up even one of these names, is it fair to then assume the artist’s identity has been engraved alongside their cause of death in your mind – making one inseparable from the other?
While it is only natural to associate suicide with depression because let’s be honest, rarely any happy people decide to end their own lives. It’s human to sympathize and mourn over a life taken so soon as the world would never get to see the potential said artist could’ve been.
As for mysterious circumstances, if the person has had a history with mental health issues, then it doesn’t really take a genius to connect the dots and assume their actions, no matter how accidental, surely must’ve been executed with an intent to kill.
Why you may ask? Because we hate mysteries and if curiosity really could kill cats, then the entire feline family would’ve been closer to the dinosaurs than to humans. As much as we relish in the anticipation of the unknown, we cannot forgo the unanswered.
For instance, if we consider Vincent Van Gogh’s image in media, even works made during a happier period in his life, are more often than not, interpreted by the general public as him trying hard to escape his misery. This is evident by claims that suggest he ate yellow paint to feel happy, and thus reinforcing that sunflowers and his other bright paintings must be him trying to escape his reality.
Art always has and will be open to interpretation so if making a backstory for the piece one is analysing provides for a stronger, more impactful and relatable experience, nothing in the world can change a person’s perspective set in concrete.
Not being able to bear the incomplete image we have of that artist in our minds, we take it upon ourselves to fill in the blanks and ram the piece in, trying to make it fit, regardless of whether it belongs in the puzzle.
While this may not seem like a big deal on the surface-level, yet it bears the risk of overshadowing the artist’s entire life outside his misery. And thus making his torment, the one thing he was trying to escape, the sole testament of his identity.
It is perfectly normal for ordinary people to be depressed and consumed by sadness when we’re at our lowest, then why should the greats among us be any different?
These words are not to diminish the severity of the artists’ psychotic episodes and serious mental health issues, but to erase the shadow cast by those tiny moments spent in the rock bottom over a lifetime filled with every other emotion capable of being felt by our wonderful minds. It’s to remember the artist for solely being an artist and not a sob story of a mad genius.
Art is the cure to whichever ailment gives your soul a heartburn. Often times, when I've been at my lowest, I’ve resorted to taking refuge in my favourite artists’ works to forget about the world around. Yet their art never plunged me any lower than I already was.
Art isn’t something you clutch onto to help you wallow in your pity but an unparalleled solace that makes you feel not so alone in your solitude.
Art manages to penetrate the glass around you at times when other humans seem to be mere spectators tapping on it from outside, wondering when the fish in the aquarium would shake out of its standstill trance.
I believe it is human nature to associate things and create a hive of all emotions and feeling so neither of them get lost in the abyss, because if the worst ones get lost, then one has a mightily daunting task of learning how to deal with them anew. And in doing so, the pain and hurt is clubbed with its medicine and cure.
But lest the cure be infested by the disease. We owe it to ourselves to never let the antidote turn into the same poison it is trying to annihilate. This antidote woven in every stroke of the brush or every chord of the guitar is what makes the art great.
Not to presume that within the threads of the canvas or vibrations of the sounds of your favourite song lie all of your answers about life. That human emotions are so simple is a notion this essay particularly has been trying to refute. Art might not be the solution one longs for in desperate times but it can be the warm blanket one tightly tugs onto when the cold rattles their bones.
What great art can be considered as is the artists' gift to the world, one they felt a dire need to putting out into the universe, in case someone tomorrow or a hundred years from now quest for it.
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