The art of the joyful
Imagine an artist. Any artist. A painter, a writer, a sculptor. You can probably picture them in their studio, working, surrounded by canvas, tools, papers and ink. You probably picture them working, creating their next masterpiece, hair a bit messy, eyes focused on their work, deep thoughts behind them.
Do they look happy?
Or maybe a better question would be: is there room for happiness in the scenario you just created?
Perhaps the answer is yes, and that’s great. But I wouldn’t be surprised if the answer is no. If you pictured an artist with a serious look on their face, someone tired, someone creating frenetically trying to paint or write their pain, their sadness, their madness.
I know that many times that’s what I did.
And it’s not a surprise because we tend to see artists and creatives as people that need to be in a constant state of pain or suffering in order to produce good art. Many of the artists we love had difficult lives, battling addiction, illness, etc. Think of the infamous “27 club” for example. While we regret them leaving us so early, we also know that maybe we wouldn’t have some of their music if it wasn’t for their personal, hurtful experiences.
And it is okay to empathize with them, since pain and “negative” emotions are part of life and need expression. When I first started to battle depression some years ago, I surrounded myself with the work of writers that were very vocal about their own mental health struggles in their art, such as Sylvia Plath and Alejandra Pizarnik (both of them died due to suicide). And I very much acknowledge their art is in part what it is because of what they’ve experienced. But a part of me couldn’t help thinking how much more they could have done, not just for art but for themselves, have they received proper help. A part of me felt sorry for them, because I could see the pain they felt reflected in their poetry and their journals; but oh, how I wished they didn’t have to go through all of that. No one should.
The idea of the tormented artist is something we need to rethink, and we need to realize how harmful it can be for creatives, because it is so engraved in us that we think that art can only come from a place of pain and suffering. I mean, we never hear about happy artists anyway. No one is creating when they are trying to feel good, right?
Wrong. Whenever I hear this argument, my mind goes back to Nannete, a stand up special on Netflix by Hanna Gadsby. In it, she mentions how doing comedy, while it is her job, has also been very detrimental for herself, since she had to be constantly making self-deprecating jokes. She recalls how in one of her shows, she mentioned she was taking anti-depressants, only to be approached by a man later who told her she shouldn’t do that, because artists need to “feel”.
“If Vincent Van Gogh had taken medication, we wouldn’t have the sunflowers”, the man said to her.
And here, Gadsby’s response is not only educational, but challenging to all those stereotypes of the “suffering artist”:
[Van Gogh] didn’t just painted sunflowers, he did quite a few portraits of psychiatrists. Not even random psychiatrists, psychiatrists who were treating him and medicating him. There is one particular portrait of one particular psychiatrist and he is holding a flower. And it isn’t a sunflower, it’s a foxglove. And that foxglove forms part of a medication that Vang Gogh took for epilepsy. And the derivative of the foxglove, if you overdose it, [is that] you can experience the color yellow a little too intensely. So perhaps, we have the sunflowers precisely because Van Gogh medicated.
That particular segment helped me change my perspective on art and artists.
To see one of the biggest artists, and one of the biggest representatives, if you may, of the “tormented artist” stereotype in a different light, made me realize that we don’t know how much of the art we know and love can come not from pain, but from genuine attempts to feel something other than pain.
Suffering doesn’t have to be the burden of creativity, the inevitable destiny of artists who have to create while in pain for the rest of us to enjoy. Art can be joyful too. It can come from happiness, from freedom, from improvement.
And we need it, just as we need art that expresses our dark emotions, we also need art that shows the brighter ones. Just because happiness or joy don’t seem as complex or complicated as pain, it doesn’t make them less valuable. In fact, we need them more precisely because of that simplicity. We need the dancing and the catchy tunes and the bright colors, because we can’t live always in pain. It is unbearable and unsustainable, for the artists and for the admirers of said art.
Life is such a kaleidoscope of emotions that it would be silly to fixate on just a couple of them. Because I also realized, that on the days where my depression got better, I didn’t need Plath’s poems to remind me how bad it can get again, but instead I needed words of encouragement and hope, to enjoy that little break my brain was giving me.
With the world constantly challenging our ability to keep hope around, to smile under our mask and to just feel something other than sadness lately, joy is what we need. Even if it sems silly or unreal. I know that right now, I don’t need to read dark apocalyptic novels. And while I will still find refuge in sad poems on my gloomy days, I also need a tune that makes me jump out of bed on a Sunday and, even if just for 5 minutes, remember that joy is possible. I need to know that someone else in the other side of the world is also dancing in their pajamas before going to bed. I need connection in the form of hope. I need to remember the art of the joyful.
