The Dangerous Trope of the Tortured Artist

Spoiler: You don't have to be tortured to be an Artist

TW: I’ll be speaking on a traumatic event I experienced, mention of PTSD and alcoholism.

Somehow by contextualizing artists' ability to make great art as a result of their suffering, there is a justification for the why behind the art making and a purpose behind the torment.

In 2016 I ran for my life. Not many Americans know what happened on Bastille Day in Nice, France that year.

I had won a scholarship to study abroad and expand my awareness of Impressionism and the Greats that brought it to life. I was young and hopeful for my art to one day hang on walls in pristinely lit galleries. I wasn’t sure of my style or overall theme of what I wanted to express or how, but I knew my purpose was to create. I’d spend days with no sleep, from sun up to sun down, painting, researching, practicing. I wanted so badly to be an artist I’d cycle into moments that turned into months of despair and desperation lamenting the possibility of just falling into obscurity without my art ever having meant anything. I saw this trip as a supplemental turning point that added to my new position as an interning assistant curator. Here, I would recreate myself, open myself up to new possibilities.

Then a massacre occurred on the Promenade de Anglais - almost 100 people perished.

This hadn’t been the first traumatic experience in my life, but it was the first time everyone I knew had watched what I had experienced on the news.

I felt like an open wound with every nerve exposed to every element. The rawness of this vulnerability made me want to step outside my skin. Claw my way out so that I wouldn’t have to know it. I replayed the night in my head over and over wondering how in our drunken state from our celebration we were able to get away. I replayed the words from one of my peers over in my head, I had been inconsolably crying as we waited for our friends to arrive back safely when she told me, “This seems to have affected you more than anyone else, maybe you should find someone to talk to.”

I spent the remainder of my trip painting in parks and gazing in awe at the masterworks of Renoir and Bonnard. Tears seemed to never leave my eyes. I had found a small sketchbook in an art supply store and made sure to keep my thoughts from racing by dragging the colorful markers I carried with me across this tiny paper. Scrawling lines together as we walked to museums and historical monuments. Documenting thoughts I knew would haunt me at night or with my next glass of Rose.

I started to doubt my purpose. If all of the suffering I had already experienced in my life wasn’t enough that I would now have to experience more, what was the point of anything? This didn’t push me to make more art. It made me want to hide and never speak or laugh again.

When I returned home, I wasn’t sure what to expect. I was overcome by the vulnerability in the people who shared their experiences with me from their home country, and what acclimating to a new life was like for them. It confused me when people started introducing me to new acquaintances as, “the girl who was in the terrorist attack.” An identity I didn’t realize was no longer my own but one given to me.

My own swirling and overwhelming emotions surprised me. I felt guilty, humbled, angry, and resentful. But I was especially shocked by a particular comment that came from other artists with a big, eager smile painted across their faces -

“Imagine the art that will come from this.”

Initially it disgusted me.

This strange sentiment that sounded less like an encouragement to express myself and more of a suggestion to commoditize what was at that time a unique experience. A comment that skipped past all polite pleasantries and sympathies and dove straight into a commercialized idea of what to do with a suffering I had in me, one that they didn’t know of and never thought to ask about. And why would they ask?

As a society we don’t want to know the details of someone’s suffering. We like to see the overcoming of, the highlighted cliff notes toward an inevitable triumph through pain. We like to see the fruit from a sugarcoated labor. We want to know what the happy ending looks like after all the mess. And the mess in question?

Make sure it’s entertaining, otherwise we don’t want to see it.

And from the outside, my suffering was hugely entertaining. The life of the party, a “breath of fresh air” in the authenticity I seemed to carry in myself. I drowned my panic and terror in alcohol, became incredibly vulnerable when I spoke and told my stories in a frank and casual way. As if it was all behind me, I feigned the air of a now healed, confident, strong and independent individual.

I was still in art school pumping out homework based portraits while desperately trying to unpack this devastating existentialism I found myself in. I rooted through my sexuality and the male gaze while persistently being enveloped by the understanding of what humans were capable of doing to each other on a world scale. I wasn’t naive to this understanding before my traumatic encounter in France, but it had shaken my faith in anything human or spiritual.

I wanted to strip down to the most basic form. Being human felt dirty and dangerous. I went to shows topless, I exposed myself to the world in performance not to figure out who I was but why I was. I had just begun to come to terms with myself in the world as a woman and what that meant for me in the grand scheme of my life. What would that look like as an artist? What did that mean for the pain I had already experienced? The layers felt never ending and my creations became abstract. All I cared about was what path I could take that would lead me away from this feeling. I painted shapes and drew lines that in my mind were roads. I did it obsessively, compulsively, hoping one day it would become a map of something I could understand. I used my body more and painted those hopeful maps onto my skin, I imagined the paint hiding me away from the world while it ate at the rest of me. But was it art-making? I wanted so badly to give up. I put myself in dangerous situations as a way to test fate. To laugh in the face of whatever had saved me.

I wasn’t making art. I was unraveling.

When I painted I would remember the cloud of lingering trauma throughout the city. A truck would backfire and an entire street filled with people would turn to make sure everything was okay. Flashbacks of tourists and hotel employees sobbing in the lobby as we watched the count of injured and deceased rise as each hour passed. The feeling of an entire city in mourning like a film of sweat on my skin that I couldn’t wash off.

The thought of doing anything aside from pushing the boundary of my own perceived youthful invincibility was devastating. I was sick often with upper respiratory infections every other month. I drank with no end and even scheduled my hangovers to make things work. I felt the weight of the world as if I was at the bottom of the sea, praying that something would pull me back up to the surface. But every time I tried to reach out all I would be met with was,

“You’re just having fun!”
”Put it in your art.”
”But isn’t that just how artists are?”

I felt trapped inside the toxic and dangerous narrative of what I had always aspired to become: An Artist, a “real” artist. But the only thing I could even begin to imagine creating was a hole in the Earth somewhere that I could bury myself in so I could find peace from what I couldn’t stop feeling.

What I’ve come to realize almost 10 years later is that the trope of the tortured artist is a romanticized fantasy of a person whose suffering magically flows out from the depths of them and transforms into something inspiring. From a distance, the moody, broody, sensitive nature of this idyllic character is endearing.

People love to watch and read about the caricatured stories of historical figures who rebelled against the wrongdoings of their time. They admire the candid complexity and misadventures of characters like Bojack Horseman and House. But when faced with the reality of these characters in their everyday lives without the frame of entertainment securing a safe distance from their stable lives, they are no longer palatable or endearing characters. They become criminals, alcoholics, and narcissists.

They become regular people.

When we hear stories about any prolific and successful artist, the first thing we encounter is their often times, heartbreaking and difficult past. We’re immersed in the suffocating pain they endured in their early life and follow their journey into a glorious conquering of their torment through their discovery of their passion in art.

The aspect of these stories that aren’t always underlined is that these artists usually had some kind of support, however minimal. Whether it was emotional or financial, they had someone for some period of time that cheered them on, that got them help, that got them connected, that made sure they were fed, and sheltered.

The most notable example that comes up in conversations like this is Van Gogh. Although the most common narrative of Van Gogh is one of the penniless, madman who never got to see his fame, the reality of his story however tragic is filled with love and support at the very least from his brother.

Theo Van Gogh is not often mentioned in the same context of the narrative of the Vincent Van Gogh, despite his continuous and unwavering support of his brother’s art career. He used his expertise as an art dealer to share his brother’s art with everyone he knew and would send him monthly allowances so that he could focus solely on his craft. After both Vincent and Theo Van Gogh’s death, Theo’s wife, Johanna van Gogh-Bonger dedicated the rest of her life to ensuring that Van Gogh’s legacy was established and widespread.  

Van Gogh failed at a lot of things before his focus turned to painting. He’d try his hand as an art dealer, language teacher, preacher, bookseller, and missionary worker all to no avail. Although he started his career in painting later in life (in comparison to other aspiring artists at that time) at the age of 27, over the next 10 years of his life he would create over 2000 works. Studying and practicing on his own determined to connect with the world around him. 

Like the majority of creative minds, Vincent found a comfort in painting. It was his escape from the bouts of depression and mania that he would experience throughout his life and his connection to nature and his environment. He gave so much of himself to this endeavor not just as catharsis but as a career. He had a few exhibitions in his lifetime that were highly praised, despite him only selling at most two of his pieces. There is even evidence to show that his demise wasn't intentionally self-inflicted, but an accident that ended with his determination to keep the child whose hand held the gun, safe. And within the entire context of this story filled with a brother's faith and a man's all-encompassing dedication to his new-found passion, the singular part of the story that rings out across generations is that Vincent Van Gogh was a tortured artist and that was how he was able to make great art. Despite the fact that the very reason we know of Van Gogh at all was thanks to the captivating words written in the letters between him and his brother - an unyielding connection and trust in what could be. And if not for Johanna’s tenacity in fulfilling this wish, they would be lost to the void of time, buried with the years Van Gogh spent nurtured by his sibling.

Somehow by contextualizing artists' ability to make great art as a result of their suffering, there is a justification for the why behind the art making and a purpose behind the torment they endured.

As many artists do, I see myself in Van Gogh. Perpetually agonized by an ache that lives at the bottom of an endless depth of feelings, unwavering even in the face of everyday responsibilities and societal pressures. Waves of immense grief and joy over the simplicities of life that come out in big expressions that escape just being on canvas or paper. The woe of constantly realizing that others find me out of place in a world where expression should stay in pretty formulated pictures and limited in other areas of life.

I often wonder what might have been had I found support for my illness or even the acknowledgement that it was there in the first place. I wonder about the suffering I may have been able to miss if I had had the tools to manage the pain from it sooner. If there was someone like Theo who could have walked the steps with me toward a path of healing early on.

I’m about to be 35, two years younger than Van Gogh was when he passed. My suffering was layered with many experiences that affected me in a multitude of ways and aspects of my life, no one experience making my journey harder than the other. Although there are many could-have-beens that come to mind some days, I find reclamation in reaching my Bipolar diagnosis now at this age. A kind of second chance at healing, at surrounding myself with support, love, and acknowledgement for every facet of my being and essence. Another opportunity to be vulnerable in my art and as an individual, to express the deep bounds of who I am and what I believe in, in a way that doesn’t destroy me or hide pain. That will never hide away who or why I am again.

When we romanticize people and their lives it’s very easy to fall into a yearning for a bigger meaning. Many people have these absolutely gut wrenching stories that make you wonder how they could have possibly survived. It’s even more overwhelming to think of the extent of that pain and watch the person who came from it make something awe-inspiring, beautiful, complex, and outside of the realm of your own imagination. As artists, we often hear the question, “How do you even think of this?”

It is truly a disservice to that person - who has struggled and labored over this finely tuned craft despite everything, who so nakedly expresses and shares the transformation of that pain into beauty with the public - to over glorify their hardship and have it receive the sole credit for their talent. To overlook the years of dedication, of discipline, of monumental sacrifice over their often times profuse desire to stay hidden.

The “Tortured Artist” trope erases the humanity of talented, creative people. It keeps them from receiving foundational support that allows them to truly thrive. We should be applauding and ruminating over the hope and perseverance they had to continue creating despite internal chaos and celebrating the people that helped them get there.

What I wish I could have told 2016 me is that she was always an artist. Through the struggle and the pain, when she walked into AA, when she sought out therapy, she was still an artist. I wish I could have told her that she would always be one, too. Not because of her turmoil or even her healing, but because of the way she saw the world, her eagerness to express and connect, because of the beauty she sees and inspects within every morsel of life.

You are an artist, because you simply are.