Most Disagreeable Clients: Rachel Morris

The enduring myth of the tortured artist.

“Great artists suffer for the people.”
Marvin Gaye

There are enough creative people who have suffered ‘for their art’ and written – or sung, painted, sculpted, or filled letters – about it that creativity and unhappiness have become intertwined in many minds. A connection between creation and addiction, self-harm, or the ‘starving artist in their garret’ is painted as inevitable.
Is it really necessary to suffer in order to create? Do creative people somehow suffer more than people who pursue less overtly artistic activities? And what of the corollary: if suffering is necessary for creating great art, and if everyone suffers at some point in their lives (which they surely do), does this mean anyone is capable of creating great art?

“I feel ever so strongly that an artist must learn to be nourished by his passions and by his despairs. These things alter an artist whether for the good or for the better or the worse. … feelings of desperation and unhappiness are more useful to an artist than the feeling of contentment, because desperation and unhappiness stretch your whole sensibility.”
Francis Bacon

I do think that there may be a kind of suffering in choosing an unusual life, which commitment to creativity often entails. If you care for the opinions of others and society, living unconventionally may give you feelings of shame, isolation, or pain. If you feel uncomfortable in solitude, the aloneness required for creative focus will not always be easy (though working creatively in a coffee shop, library, or other social space if you can concentrate in such surroundings may be enough to ease your way).
Being creative is rarely financially rewarding except for a fortunate few, which can create all kinds of difficulties. Lack of recognition for one’s work can take an emotional and psychological toll over time. The strain of having to constantly renew self-belief in the face of worldly indifference cannot be underestimated.
And creation itself can be painful, of course. Overcoming a sense of resistance to be able to start and keep going; fumbling your way towards an understanding of what you’re even trying to do; making endless little decisions; gazing aghast into the chasm between the vision in your head and how it turned out in reality; comparing your flaws, weaknesses, and talents to those of others; carrying on through all that and more day after day.
None of it is comparable to living in a war-torn nation, or having to adjust to a new disability or to grief, of course. But nor should it be waved away by those who, for example, don’t understand the drive to create and consider it frivolous. They’ll see such forms of suffering as avoidable and self-imposed, perhaps self-indulgent. (They’re right, though not in the way they think).
But is it necessary, in order to be creative? I think that’s the wrong question. All human experiences, and understanding of them – our own and those of others – inform, colour, and enrich our creations. If suffering in life is inevitable no matter what we do, then it is a tool, and creativity is a salve.

“I started painting in the madhouse, where I learnt how to translate emotions, fear, violence, hope, and joy into painting. It was through creation that I discovered the sombre depths of depression, and how to overcome it.”
Niki De Saint Phalle

Whether art is ‘great’ or not is a judgement we can’t truly make for ourselves. It tends to be reached through some collective process of osmosis, usually after we’ve died, if at all.
But I firmly believe that art (of any kind) is worth pursuing, whether or not it might ever be thought of as ‘great’, whatever that means. For its own sake, for our own sake, and for the benefit of those who love it. Even if they seem few and far between. Perhaps especially then.

“Right here people might bring up Vincent van Gogh as an example of a painter who did great work in spite of – or because of – his suffering. I like to think that van Gogh would have been even more prolific and even greater if he wasn’t so restricted by the things tormenting him. I don’t think it was pain that made him so great – I think his painting brought him whatever happiness he had.”
David Lynch

Something not talked about nearly as often, but really crucial, is the suffering caused by not creating. There is the suffering for ourselves.

“Unused creativity is not benign. It metastasizes. It turns into grief, rage, judgement, sorrow, shame.”
Brene Brown

And it causes suffering for others. Fascists, terrorists, narcissists, racists – all determinedly unhappy people who lash out are detached from their own creativity. It’s why Donald Trump can’t dance and has no sense of humour.

“People who have a creative side and do not live it out are most disagreeable clients. They make a mountain out of a molehill, fuss about unnecessary things, are too passionately in love with somebody who is not worth so much attention, and so on. There is a kind of floating charge of energy in them which is not attached to its right object and therefore tends to apply exaggerated dynamism to the wrong situation.”
Marie-Louise von Franz

It’s easy to say the things I say here, not nearly so easy to live them. Such lasting lights as Virginia Woolf and Ernest Hemingway wrote entreating us to live, to keep living, to stay as alive as possible. Sylvia Plath wrote about how hard it was that she couldn’t know or experience everything that ever existed; she was so greedy and longing for it all. All three cut their own days short by their own hands. They stopped making; unmade themselves.
Each act of creativity is an act of hope. One day at a time we can keep going, and creating, ourselves. We can look at the suffering we collectively impose on this precious planet and each other, and make expressions of it, transforming it into power, resistance, and healing.

“The exercise of imagination is dangerous to those who profit from the way things are because it has the power to show that the way things are is not permanent, not universal, not necessary.”
Ursula K Le Guin

And we can heal ourselves.

“I could not live in any of the worlds offered to me — the world of my parents, the world of war, the world of politics. I had to create a world of my own, like a climate, a country, an atmosphere in which I could breathe, reign, and recreate myself when destroyed by living. That, I believe, is the reason for every work of art.”
Anaïs Nin

As is so often the case, I trust to the wisdom of David Lynch: “It’s good for the artist to understand conflict and stress. Those things can give you ideas. But I guarantee you, if you have enough stress, you won’t be able to create. And if you have enough conflict, it will just get in the way of your creativity. You can understand conflict, but you don’t have to live in it.”
So, that’s about before, and during, the creative process. But for me, most of all, there’s the great overarching gift: transmutation of pain through creation throughout the process. Suffering becomes compost for a most glorious garden.
You decide what goes on the compost heap, what to take out, and where to use it for growth, for those shining fruits and flowers. You’re the gardener.

You can find more of this sort of thing in my magazine The Acorn, which explores and supports creative renaissance in midlife and up.
https://theacornmagazine.substack.com