Why making art is not an indulgence, or for other people

You know you want to...

Many years ago, when I was quite new to making art again, and doing things like painting big coloured shapes of luscious pink acrylic on the outside of envelopes for friends, I went to the post office. As I pushed the envelope across the counter, the woman looked up at me. ‘Did you do that?’, she asked. ‘Um, yes’. ‘Well’, she said, ‘I wish I had time to do things like that’.

Somewhere, in a cold forgotten corner hidden and beyond reach, I really do think that everyone wants to play with colours, mark out shapes, sing their heart out. But then they go to school. Art teachers teach them how to make a proper person, not that little stick figure. And when they can’t even make a stick figure, they’re told that this kind of thing is really not for them, look over there at how well Angela has made that drawing of her sister. They work out that art and music, and maybe writing and dance too, are for those kids who seem to miraculously know just where the beat is, or how to make their pencil outline the correct shape of a forearm.

This is cultural conditioning, the first step on a path that takes you anywhere but in the direction of moving and playing and swimming free in the great current of life, according to your soul’s desires.

Decades later, when your soul has lived alone in the dark silo of social accommodation for way too long, something tips over. You develop some disturbing physical symptoms, your can’t quite get your breath, your feel disturbed by everything for no reason. Maybe, after ignoring these things for quite some time, you go looking for a therapist, perhaps even an art or music therapist, though that’s not that likely.

If your sense of growing desperation gives you permission to pick up an instrument and make a sound, or to take a brush in your hand and finally stick it into a gloopy pot of cobalt blue, your soul might start to get a bit excited. But now there’s something wrong with you that you’re trying to fix. You’ve been told a story that says that you’re allowed to play like this because it might ‘help’ the ‘thing that’s wrong’ with you. But of course you’re not really going to take up art or music, because that’s for someone else, those kids who shone in that inexplicable way all that time ago.

I was lucky, in that sense. Art was ‘allowed’, although it came with a subtle form of vigilance that watched me carefully to see just how brilliant I was going to become. The story I got from the culture was that art was this vast and holy wonder, calling to me from a distant horizon. Unfortunately all the guides were off helping other people, and they forgot to give me the map. No matter, I was certain that one day I was just going to step lightly into the deep currents of the stream that I could feel flowed through us all, that was going to carry me deeper into my life in art, as was my destiny.

It didn’t happen. I had no qualifications, no experience, and I needed to pay my bills. I gradually became someone who, while vaguely remembering the beginning, nevertheless accepted that art and music was no longer a part of their life. I regularly assured myself that I was lucky to have finally found my way into a properly-paid job which did, after all, have ‘lots of scope for creativity’.

When I finally fell over, it took quite some time for me to understand that the only thing that was going to restore me to balance was making art and playing my instruments. Not because I was someone who was ‘going to respond well to art and music therapy’ but because art, music, movement and words are as necessary to the human organism as air, water and food.

Art is not a therapy and there is nothing wrong with anyone¹. The ‘something wrong’ is itself a recent meme; an emergence from a big fat cocktail of the medicalisation of everything that breathes and the fabricated worlds of norms and wellness created by advertising and media giants, all delivered on a daily basis through that recently upgraded piece of metal that everyone holds in their hands.

What is ‘wrong’ is the human condition. You can read back hundreds, even thousands of years, and find any number of examples of desperate humans feeling out of their depths, terrified of loss, flattened by life. Being broken by disappointment, shattered by abuse, shipwrecked by betrayal, or overwhelmed by the deep sadness of loneliness, sickness or death, is nothing new.

Humans have, until relatively recently, made art in its widest sense to help them face everything that life throws in their path; and they have made it communally. While there may always have been specialists in ritual or the making of certain things, colour, design, pattern, dance and song used to be for everyone. They’re how humans cope; in the making and the doing, in the offering and the receiving. Art exists to alleviate pain, bring us together in sorrow, pour oil upon our wounds, lead us back to breath.

Because I always felt that art was such a huge and mysterious calling, I missed this basic truth for a very long time. I’ve actually only just realised that art - mine and other people’s - exists not only as a salve for the larger world, but also to make my own life tolerable; in an existential rather than therapeutic sense. How, indeed could it be a salve for the world if it didn’t work like this at an individual level?

I see now that even the most prolific and professional artists are, in various and subtle ways, exploring and alleviating the pressures and unresolved questions of their own lives. Using their skill and their craft, they dance with it all until answers to their own questions are revealed; in the process slowly assembling something new, which is a gift to the world, but also a private resolution.

1. Of course this is an absurd generalisation/overstatement. But I’m trying to make a point. Even if a person has a diagnosis, or struggles with many aspects of life (further question, is there really something wrong or are they just a variant of what other people expect/think they should be? Or what the culture assumes in order make everyone [kids at school, for example] more manageable and controllable?), my point is that making art of any kind will change a person’s experience of life. We need art to be healthy, and, really, we need it communally.