Blogpost 1: Mad Artist

Insane. Crazy. Eccentric and Lunatic. These are the words people used to describe artists.

Artists appear to be mentally disturbed because both madness and creativity are rooted in the unconscious, Dr. Barten said. Creativity and madness, those two different things have the similarities that most of us would understand and maybe even have experienced it ourselves. Every artist and painter has the same trait of lick of madness to their works no matter how sane they appear to be. Every project or work goes through a great deal of emotions in order to create a masterpiece. The roller coaster ride of emotions is what drives an artist to do what they are good at, producing artworks. Usually, strong and aggressive emotions are seen on the creations, maybe with a tinge of madness, is your clue to actually seeing that someone is having a trip down insanity lane.

So while researching about artists with mental illness, I’ve come across an article entitled “The Real Link between Creativity and Mental Illness” in blogs.scientificamerican.com written by one of the known psychologist Scott Barry Kaufman. He stated that there are many eminent artists who had suffer a terrible childhood and have been emotionally unstable. Though, it does not necessarily mean that mental illness contributes to the eminence. He also said that according to Andreas Fink and colleagues that when they directly compare the brain of a creative person with no mental illness and the brain of a schizotypy, it shows high similarity in the brain pattern during the creative thinking.

According to him“The romantic notion that mental illness and creativity are linked is so prominent in the public consciousness that it is rarely challenged. Researchers agree that mental illness is neither necessary nor sufficient for creativity.  But is there still a connection between the two?”

Most individual thought that having this so called mental illness will give those advantages such as increased imagination, more emotional, and overpowering energy. The mythology of madness as fuel for creativity or all artists are crazy affects how we view the artists. And one of the dangers of this myth is that we see ourselves as not crazy enough to be creative or we tend to think that paranoia and schizophrenia should be endured in order for us to produce art. In the essay, Kaufman mentioned a few studies investigating challenged what he called the “romantic notion that mental illness and creativity are linked.” We romanticized the illness to much that we forgot how these artists are also people who suffer , and we often label them as “mad genius” ”mad artist” or “tortured artist. “As time goes by it will be a lot harder for them to seek help.

Speaking of mad artist, in another article I’ve read “You don’t have to be Mad” in theguardian.com which was written by Alexander Linklater. The term “Mad Artist” starts from the two conflicts in the 19^th century. First they romanticized the illness as an inspiration for the artist and then the second is the less enthusiasm to classify it as a medical condition.  The Whitechapel gallery in London opens an exhibit “Inner Worlds Outside” where criminals, people with autism, and other genuine outsiders - making no distinction between the two kinds of artist. And it was shown that there is no distinct connection between mental illness and creativity.

He said that “Primitivism, naive art, dadaism and surrealism all invoked a realm of fantastic or unconscious disorder, but it was most particularly in expressionism that the notion of the mad artist found its modern incarnation. The pioneers of expressionism were by no means all insane”

I quite agree with what he said, those artists in a specific had a weird and unusual way of expressing their art. Like surrealism that Salvador Dali was famous for; he uses automatism as a technique in creating his work. Automatism is a process where you let your subconscious mind express through allowing the hand move randomly on the paper. I think that most people today judge the artists if his insane or not through his work of art; like if the piece is dark and gruesome people will already conclude that the said artist is disturbed. 

"It is important that we do not romanticize people with mental health problems, who are too often portrayed as struggling creative geniuses” said Beth Murphy, Head of Information at Mind. A creative person that has a long history of mental illness in the family doesn’t mean he is crazy too or it doesn’t necessarily prone to the illness. We don’t need to be crazy to be creative; we don’t need to torture our mind to call our masterpiece an art. We just need to find the right inspiration and mental illness is not one of them.