Must We Suffer for Our Art?

Vincent Van Gogh, Frida Kahlo, Goya, Caravaggio, Munch, Toulouse-Lautrec, Jackson Pollock, Beethoven, Mozart, Freddie Mercury, Kurt Cobain, Amy Winehouse, Eric Clapton, Hemingway, George Orwell, Dostoevsky, Esenin, Sylvia Plath, Eminescu, Diane Arbus, Vivian Maier — and you may continue the list with whomever you’d like.

Surely there are many, many more…artists who have suffered for their art or who have created from suffering (as well). The myth of the tortured artist —​ ​as some consider it and call it —​ i​s so present in our culture that you wonder whether this is not, in fact, the normality. Probably not, but there are several matters to discuss here, many of which are found below.

One of them refers to the breath that this myth is thought to have given art. The other one refers indeed to suffering. However, the idea of suffering for art may very well be misunderstood. Perhaps it’s not the suffering itself that helps, but the experiences that people have, the absences, the thoughts or the things that nag us, especially at night. You know how it is, you had a busy day, maybe even a stressful, unhappy one or, on the contrary, a very pleasant day; you go to bed thinking you’re done, you finished, it’s time to rest, and then it hits you — the wandering mind, in an overwhelming race against itself, giving you the feeling that everything is out of your control. Artists are no exception. Quite a lot of them complain about the schedule somehow imposed on them by society and by their jobs, since inspiration hits them exactly when they don’t have the time for it.

Throughout history, art played a notorious part in response to situations of depression, grief or physical illness.

Schumann​’s “Second Symphony” — written during a period of severe depression; ​Brahms’​ “Requiem” — composed after the death of his mother and one of his best friends; or Messiaen​’s “End of Times Quartet” — written in prison; or T​udor Arghezi​’s​ ​well-known volume “Flori de mucigai”— which gave us all a headache when we were in school — also written in prison. There are even artists whose entire careers are marked by suffering, without which they would not have had the same strength or the same beauty. What would the works of ​Wilde​, V​an Gogh o​r ​Chopin ​have looked like if their lives were not so marked by pain? Undoubtedly, a lot of irreplaceable creations throughout the history of art arose from negative, difficult life experiences.

However, I wonder: Does artistic creation necessarily have to go hand in hand with pain? Is it true that the best works are created during moments of suffering?

Do they come into being like this because, as a creative person, the only way to extract from yourself that which marks you, in order to cope with it, is by creating? Not everyone is born with the luck of having people around to offer them support, and throughout history, the specialized help that exists nowadays was not even a dream.

I’m thinking that for many, art is the only refuge, the only oasis of peace during moments of crisis.

Perhaps the memorability of works born out of suffering is not about the negativity of the feeling, only about its intensity. If happiness struck us as hard as someone’s death — but in a good way — would we have enough fuel to get amazing works out of this as well?

I’ve often wondered whether more creativity or any type of artistic act may result from moments that turn your world inside out than from positive circumstances. I’ve asked others, too. I’ve read about this topic or, rather, this cornerstone of artists, that in order to be deemed a complete artist one must be troubled. Of course, opinions, as different as each human being, are divided. Even though there are scientific studies in psychology that have focused on it, and all sorts of experiments are continued. Here I would like to raise another question. Speaking of scientific experiments. How is it that phenomenal art also arises from tragedies, while criticizing a person, making them work out of fear and discomfort, brings much worse (scientifically proven) results than encouraging them? It’s a paradox worth a separate discussion.

However, an affirmative answer prevails. Yes, artistic acts often result from pain. Nevertheless, it would be interesting to see whether people’s lives are rather unhappy than happy. If the result leans toward suffering, don’t good works arise then merely because this is the average? Or is it because being truly happy is something so rare that when you feel it you can only enjoy the feeling, which excludes creation?

It is not pain itself that does the job, but the change it produces and brings.

Pain itself paralyzes you, and you can’t do anything about it, but afterward, from what you experienced, from the way it marked you, often a momentum of something appears; a glimmer, a light at the end of the dark tunnel you were going through hopelessly, a place where you find refuge or something that frees you or makes you understand why you are feeling — in your own individual way — the feelings and sensations caused by pain.

Happiness does that as well. Y​es, again there are studies: Lovers are also often included here, but the matter is debatable. Rather, those encouraged to create through happiness are the exception to the rule. And art is this as well, isn’t it? A series of exceptions to the rule, where the soul comes in, and technique and studies become irrelevant.

But great artists, wherever you’d look for them, have been mostly troubled. I repeat, the magnitude of pain matters less, because in the end, by processing the pain, if the moment itself has a profound meaning to you, its intensity will be greater than the severity/intensity of the situation itself anyway. The idea is the one that persists. The idea makes you wonder, search, understand.

The traumatized spirit sometimes distances itself from pain through creation or absorbs it entirely in order to reach a form of inner peace where possible. It’s sort of a painkiller (perhaps that’s why there is another label stuck to creative people, that of being depraved — and many have been and still are, but there are plenty here who are not. Enough of them so that it isn’t considered a fuel for creation as strong as suffering). We can also classify creation through suffering as a way of achieving mental balance, while the peaceful spirit is looking for satisfaction and lacks the discipline to set down things, to systematize them. Because it has nothing to solve, only to feel. But often unfortunate situations need solutions.

Pain and love…they both produce art, as it means the artist is true to themselves, stripped bare of appearances, reduced to essences and real. In the beauty and ugliness of human experiences we intuitively recognize what is true.

Spanish artist V​íctor Mira​ once said:

“​Art is not reasonable. It does not submit, it does not listen, neither willingly nor out of fear, to someone who is not a virtuoso. Just as neither suffering nor pain will let themselves be governed by incapable artists. In order to be art, pain must have something that haunts the mind, it must be able to be thought out and frozen. On the contrary, it is an automatic reflex that responds to suffering or pain, a shock absorber. (…) An artist should not have any other goal or concern than the art they had taken upon themselves or, rather, than being an empty space in which art can happen.”

Suffering and pain that are not filtered and interpreted by a creative mind practically do not contain anything, much less can they be turned into art. The artist, Mira thought, must be capable of separating from their own pain in order to see it as an object. Only then will they be able to look at pain without suffering it and, free of their passions, will they manage to place themselves in that silent “empty space” that allows them to witness everything and generate art.

Not every pain generates art, and suffering and pain are ephemeral, mutable. Art has instead the ability to be eternal. The artist is capable of “freezing” their suffering in order to make it eternal, to express it artistically.

They say ​Henri Matisse​ painted with great difficulty, as he had arthritis. Not only had he to endure the quasi-impossibility of moving his joints, but he also had terrible pain. When asked why he kept painting even though he was already famous and had a good standing, he replied: “The pain passes, but the beauty remains.”

Now, following the idea from which I started, it is important to mention that not all good art is the product of pain.

Yet why do we almost always get the impression or find that the best artistic works are those that express the author’s pain?

Is it perhaps because we are naturally much more empathetic to suffering than to joy?

The state of joy is taken for granted, since in a certain sense it is expected…we all expect it. We aspire to it, we dream of it, sometimes so much so that we lose touch with the cruel reality. Happiness is what man hunts in order to make his life meaningful. Pain, on the contrary, is jarring because it is a rupture, an absence of something, a thing that forces us to stop and look at that empty space. Pain, in a way, resembles nature, in the sense that it can break you at any time without your having any say in it.

We identify more easily with art born from pain because it is pain that makes us equal, makes us aware of our human condition, sensitizes us and opens us more. Suffering helps us create art because it eliminates appearances, tramples on the ego and preconceptions, destroys our shallowness and creeps deep into our soul. Sometimes it extends its tentacles so deeply that only years later do we realize how much it has changed us.

In the end, I would say that yes, most of the times we suffer for our art, especially in Romania, where we don’t even have the conditions to support it, to perpetuate it or to regulate it like any normal job.

That does not mean we have to see suffering as a catalyst for creativity, but we can learn, from the way it inspires us, how to create regardless of our mood​.​ We can use pain and suffering to observe what goes unnoticed on sunny days, to look within ourselves where we may not look at another time and, most of all, to fill the emptiness. For that, more often than not it helps to create something from scratch. The canvas is always white if the artist can see it that way or if the art has no end, as it is related to ideas that keep coming to us, ideas that cannot be controlled, they simply happen; then the variations and possibilities to create are infinite, limited only by what you can see at the moment where you press the shutter button, sit at your desk to write or stand in front of the easel to paint.