Why Make Art During Difficult Times

Did you know that Vincent van Gogh created "Starry Night" while hospitalized at a mental institution?

These are difficult times that sometimes make us want to get back in bed and pull the covers up over our heads. Now, like during COVID and 9/11 makes many of us ask the question "What's the point in making art when the world is turned upside down?"

Creating art is not only a distraction and hobby but is also a way to process, understand and transcend difficult experiences. 

Recent studies show that making art creates new neural pathways. It re-wires our brains. Neuroscientists describe creating as a "bottom up" approach to healing and engaging sensory, motor and emotional systems. It helps with problem solving, pattern recognition and emotional regulation. (In other words it helps to make me less cranky.)

Picasso created "Guernica" in 1937 as an anti-war statement in response to the bombing of the Basque Country town in northern Spain by Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy.

The research is clear, art-making during difficult times...

• reduces stress hormones

• helps with emotional processing

• creates shared understanding

• often breaks social isolation

• takes internalized chaos and externalizes it into something tangible

• interrupts cycles of worry and anxiety

• transforms feelings of being a victim into being active in ones own healing and growth.

Frida Kahlo created the Two Fridas painting in 1939, shortly after her divorce from Diego Rivera. It shows the two sides of her personality. One is her broken hearted self in a traditional Tehuana costume. The other Frida represents her modern, independent self.

So why are you just sitting there? Get up and go create something. I am working on a new piece about the Explorer Archetype. It's keeping me from watching the news and hopefully is re-wiring those new pathways.

Still Singing. Still Creating. Still Protesting.

At the beginning of chapter one in Rollo May's classic book The Courage to Create, May asks...

"Shall we, as we feel our foundations shaking, withdraw in anxiety and panic?"

Once again 50 years later we are feeling our world turn upside down. Last month as I sat cutting paper up for my latest collage, I was asking myself why bother making art? I decided to get on a plane to the U.S. and march in a protest. As I marched with thousands of other baby boomers I thought we know how to do this. We have done this before. We are meant for these times.

The highlight of that protest was the presence of Joan Baez. She is 84 years old, still marching and still sharing her gifts in song. What an inspiration.

Since coming home I have been searching for what artists and writers are saying about creating during difficult times. I have started a collection of their thoughts to inspire me when the world feels like too much. Hope they inspire you as well.

Toni Morrison: "This is precisely the time when artists go to work. There is no time for despair, no place for self-pity, no need for silence, no room for fear. That is how civilizations heal."

Vincent Van Gogh: "Art is to console those who are broken by life."

A collective of artists: "When people in power try to remove our humanity and our dignity, art and music provide a raison d'être. The simple act of making music in difficult times becomes an act of defiance and self-determination."

Dorthea Tanning, painter: "Art has always been the raft onto which we climb to save our sanity."

Shane Koyczan: "If your heart is broken, make art with the pieces."

Willie Nelson: "I think most art comes out of poverty and hard times."

Are you finding it difficult to create during these dark times?