This is the title of one of my “kind of abstract” little paintings (acrylics- see bellow). It is also a temptations and a problem for a lot of artists… I don’t know if a connection – a causal relationship – between madness (well, call it mental sickness if you want) and artist (geniuses, at the highest…) was made before Schopenhauer… He is although the one who made this connextion famous…
The number of artists who were (a bit or a lot) crazy, mad, excentric, loony, etc. is not at all small. To cite a few : Hugo van der Goes, Vincent Van Gogh, Toulouse-Lautrec, Dali (by his own confession), Jackson Pollock, etc. Since suicide is considered by some the extreme symptom of mental illness, a lot of others could enter the ranks : Pascin, Rothko, Nicholas de Staël… And I limited myself to painters only…
Of course, the myth of the “cursed artist” (l’artiste maudit) is the general, public perception of this, in a very simplified manner. But to study the phenomenon would take volumes and volumes…
One thing is clear: if the above mentionned artists were mad they create their art only when they were perfectly lucid. I do not know a single mentionable work of art created during a crysis… but a mentally ill artist has a different, an original view of the world, a visionary one, sometimes… If we are to believe Jean Dubuffet we need to be a bit crazy and we are never crazy ENOUGH in order to create original art… Maybe it’s true, maybe not…
Danu's small world 