creativity & madness

I don’t know what the relationship is between creativity and mental illness. I can only speak from my experience. What I do know is that I have been diagnosed more than once with a mental illness and I have always been very creative. Visual art and creative writing have been my refuge, my saving grace and early on the only way I knew how to communicate with my higher power. My creative endeavors have given me insight and self-awareness that no therapy has every come close to tapping into.

As a young child in the 70’s I drew big breasted women with afros, hoop earrings, bell bottom pants and a-line dresses. I drew what I knew. I drew triangular houses with chimneys and cookie cutter apple trees- though I’m not sure I had every actually seen a real apple tree. Nonetheless, I colored in brown trunks, green leaves and red circles. I made up complicated narratives that cast me as a miniature person, about the size of a mouse, in an oversized world of giants. In my world there was always at least one imaginary friend who I openly talked to incessantly.

Growing up on the eastside of Buffalo, New York on the outskirts of an area called the “fruit belt” provided me with a lot of source material. As I moved into my preteen years, I had come to be known in my family as the “sensitive” one-code word for “troubled.” But the effects of that label and the subsequent treatment were softened by the fact that I had art in my life. I had an escape. So at the age of 12 I knew this art thing was important and I knew I needed a teacher. My school art teachers had unabashedly encouraged me to find a new hobby as they had no confidence in my abilities. I found an awesome teacher in an unlikely and amazing place.

There was a unique community art school in the fruit belt called MollyOlga Neighborhood Art Classes. It was founded in 1959 by my teacher of 10 years Molly Bethel and it provided free classes in painting, drawing, photography, sculpture, clay, etc. for all ages. I met the most eclectic group of artists there of all ages and races. This was unique because Buffalo was and is still a very segregated city. E.B. was one of the painters I met there who was about ten years older than me. He was something of mystic and always had a wisdom nugget for me when we saw each other. And his laugh was contagious, he always had some silly observation for me to chew on. An extremely talented and self-directed artist he would easily have been labeled as having schizophrenia by my colleagues today.

Then there was S.R. She was multi-talented, could move so easily from painting to clay to photography and produce beautiful works of art. She literally could do it all and had incredible business savvy to boot. She was my friend and my hero. S.R. had an explosive personality and her mood could turn on a dime. She lived and loved passionately. You could be sure that if she was your friend, she was your friend for life. Several of my friends at MollyOlga struggled with extraordinary experiences like paranoia, fear, uncommon beliefs, voices, visions, vivid dreams, etc. and they were sometimes expressed through their art. Back then I didn’t have a language to describe their struggles. And if I am to tell the whole story, there was a great deal of self-medication going on through the use of alcohol and cannabis. I didn’t judge them then and I don’t judge them now. They did the best they could with what they had, but their choices took a toll on them and many are not here today.

MollyOlga was a true to life melting pot of multi-generational and racially diverse people who were beautiful, strange, talented and loving. They were ride or die friends who would give you their last if you needed it. I could not have ended up in a more nurturing environment. It was exactly where a “troubled” creative person could grow, learn and thrive. It was a safe haven, a judgment free zone akin to the atmosphere of today’s peer run wellness centers in Georgia.

Truth be told, I had some uncommon beliefs about my art. There were times growing up when I thought I had a special relationship with Vincent van Gogh. This was long before I was diagnosed, before I began to understand that I experienced things that others didn’t and before I knew that people thought that van Gogh was crazy. I just thought we were kindred spirits tortured by our deep thoughts, intense emotions, and compulsion to make art. Contemplating his challenges back then as a teenager I earnestly wished I could have lived when he lived. I was convinced that I could have comforted him and shown him another way. Even then I was thinking like a peer specialist.

Today I have a hard time describing how my mental illness has played into my art making and vice versa. I guess I just know that it has. More often than not my art making process is like a delusion that I totally buy into and act on until the realization that it isn’t real to anyone else hits me, then I stop. When I stop believing, the painting is finished and I move on to the next piece of art work. So, I often can’t explain what my paintings are about. I just don’t know or remember. I can talk to you about color and composition, about texture and line quality, even about tension and dynamic movement. However, the narrative is left up to the viewer. So, the question becomes, is this a product of a creative process or psychosis? I just don’t know and frankly, it doesn’t matter to me. What does matter is that I keep making paintings because it feeds my spirit and keeps me on balance.