7 mental health lessons from The Artist’s Mind

#Guest post by Kathryn Vercillo

This is a guest post from Kathryn Vercillo, author of The Artist's Mind: The Creative Lives and Mental Health of Famous Artists. This book offers short biographies of famous artists through the lens of trying to understand how their mental health challenges affected their art.

All humans have to deal with the challenges of their own minds, whether or not they have or choose to use a specific label. These challenges can affect our creativity in myriad ways.

To help with that, here are seven mental health tips inspired by the artists whose work is explored in The Artist’s Mind.

01. You can use your imagination to create art that brings you peace even in challenging times

Vincent Van Gogh was living in an asylum when he created some of his best work including Starry Night. He found the place bleak, something that is depicted in some of his drawings, but he tried to spend as much time as possible painting scenes of landscapes that brought him a sense of calm, peace, and joy. He would sit in the gardens of the asylums, painting landscapes and the sky, finding beauty in nature and translating that onto a canvas in order to move that peace into his own heart and mind. You, too, may find yourself stuck somewhere that you don’t want to be. Allow your art to be a place where you express peace.

02. You will experience ebbs and flows in energy and in art-making

Georgia O’Keeffe lived with a combination of anxiety and depression that affected her creative work in varied ways. She often created in a cycle that was driven by the tendency to seek perfectionism as a result of anxiety. But knowing that the work can never be perfect, she would procrastinate, then eventually create in an intense rush just before a deadline. This wasn’t ideal because she would burnout. As she aged, she worked to create more peace in her life through nature and self-care so that she could work more consistently. However, she did create a wonderful body of work while being a complicated human that had those ebbs and flows.

03. What you’re going through could be temporary

Having a mental health condition, even a very serious one, doesn’t mean that you’ll always live with that condition. Many people experience depression or even psychosis but then heal and don’t have that experience again. Leonora Carrington and Jacob Lawrence are two examples of artists from The Artist’s Mind that had this experience. They both created work that helped them process trauma and begin healing, but their ongoing work as artists was not necessarily tied to their specific mental health challenges.

04. You can both understand and change your perception of yourself through self-portraiture

Frida Kahlo offers a great example of an artist known best for her self-portraits. She told the story of her life through these works, especially the story of her trauma, particularly related to her body. She painted herself in different situations to understand her experience of her body and perhaps to not just understand the narrative but to aid in creating it. We often have struggles with our perception of our bodies, our identities, ourselves … art can be a great way to work through those challenges.

05. Repetition in art may assist you in sorting through mental health symptoms

Several of the artists in this book use repetition in their work to help them as they deal with trauma and anxiety. Yayoi Kusama is a key example; her work repeats polka dots over and over and over, alongside a few other repetitious themes. The repetition in Kusama’s work is almost a visible, tactile version of the desire to heal through repletion. She herself has written: “By continuously reproducing the forms of things that terrify me, I am able to suppress the fear.”

06. Hyperfocusing on others’ perception of your creativity can exacerbate mental health symptoms

You may put your art out there for the world to say in various ways from seeking publication to sharing on social media. There can be a lot of value in the camaraderie of sharing art with others in this way and there can be value in constructive feedback. However, if you’re in a period of struggling with depression, anxiety, low self-worth, etc., then you may want to refrain from sharing with others for a little bit. Mark Rothko is an example of an artist whose work and mental health were greatly affected by the many negative reviews of his paintings. He found it very difficult to paint when dealing with depression and the reviews would make this significantly worse. Sometimes you have to remove yourself from exposure to that type of stuff while you use creativity to heal.

07. Ultimately, how you perceive the relationship between your mental health and your art is up to you

Does art make you feel mentally or emotionally better? Do the specific challenges that you experience - such as fatigue from depression - affect how you create? Or affect what you choose to create? Exploring these things can assist you in better understanding your mind and your art. However, no one else can define this relationship for you. Agnes Martin, for example, lived with schizophrenia, for which she was sometimes institutionalized, without ever revealing it to the world. We learned about it after her death at age 92. People have suggested that her precise line work might have been a way to give order to the chaos of her mind. Perhaps it was. But she herself was very clear that she did not see her art as related to her mental health at all. And she is the one who gets to decide that. You also get to decide your own narrative about the relationship between art and mental health.

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If you’re moved to share that narrative, feel free to leave a comment about how art and mental health feel related for you.

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This post is part of a month-long blog tour for The Artist’s Mind. There will be interviews, reviews, excerpts and more. You can find the the full tour details here. The next stop on the tour will be tomorrow, August 2, 2023 when Martin Greenwald of Socratic Psychiatrist will publish an excerpt from the book. Martin is a psychiatrist practicing in the midwest United States working mostly with patients who are psychiatrically hospitalized while also maintaining a small psychotherapy practice. His Substack is where he shares his personal thoughts and opinions on a wide range of topics including examples of art in the work that he does.