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When Walls Become Doorways: Creativity and the Transforming Illness Kindle Edition
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You are stronger than you think you are and more creative than you ever imagined.
Yet sometimes these strengths appear during a time of a weakness – when you are sick. Although illness may feel like an impassible barrier, it can be the doorway to a new and more creative existence. When this happens, an illness becomes a transforming illness and then life’s lowest moments can bring forth your greatest potential for creativity and growth.
This book will show you ways to access your creative abilities and turn an experience of poor health into a new and better life. A transforming illness can happen to anyone at any age, from childhood to the later years and may even occur more than once.
A transforming illness altered the lives of Leonardo da Vinci, Frida Kahlo, Michelangelo, Rembrandt, Georgia O’Keeffe and many other artists. Illness shaped their work and their masterpieces changed our world.
These individuals and the other artists in this book work with visual impairments, cancer, heart problems, deafness, quadriplegia, arthritis, kidney disease, learning disorders, neurological ailments, autism, AIDS, Down syndrome, and many other conditions. Rather than stopping the artists, these difficulties challenge them, inspiring both the artist and the art.
Creativity is a basic human capacity extending across all racial and cultural boundaries. In their diversity and their determination, the artists in this book show that the transforming illness is fundamental to humanity. What they have done during illness – and continue to do – is possible and available for everyone.
When the author Tobi Zausner was diagnosed with ovarian cancer in 1989, her doctor didn’t think she would last the year, but her life transformed – the wall of illness became a door of opportunity. Using fascinating and true stories of artists and drawing upon her own experience, Dr. Zausner offers methods for accessing your creative abilities. You too can turn a time of poor health into creative achievement and a more meaningful new life.
About the Author
Tobi Zausner is a research psychologist, a psychotherapist in private practice, and an award-winning visual artist with works in major museums and in private collections around the world. Dr. Zausner, who teaches at Saybrook University, publishes and lectures on the psychology of art and human potential. She is an officer on the Board of A.C.T.S (Arts, Crafts, and Theatre Safety), a non-profit organization investigating health hazards in the arts and her book, When Walls Become Doorways: Creativity and the Transforming Illness, highlights the influence of physical illness on the creative process of visual artists. A native New Yorker and an avid reader and walker, Dr. Zausner wishes there were more trees, grass, and hills in New York City.
Yet sometimes these strengths appear during a time of a weakness – when you are sick. Although illness may feel like an impassible barrier, it can be the doorway to a new and more creative existence. When this happens, an illness becomes a transforming illness and then life’s lowest moments can bring forth your greatest potential for creativity and growth.
This book will show you ways to access your creative abilities and turn an experience of poor health into a new and better life. A transforming illness can happen to anyone at any age, from childhood to the later years and may even occur more than once.
A transforming illness altered the lives of Leonardo da Vinci, Frida Kahlo, Michelangelo, Rembrandt, Georgia O’Keeffe and many other artists. Illness shaped their work and their masterpieces changed our world.
These individuals and the other artists in this book work with visual impairments, cancer, heart problems, deafness, quadriplegia, arthritis, kidney disease, learning disorders, neurological ailments, autism, AIDS, Down syndrome, and many other conditions. Rather than stopping the artists, these difficulties challenge them, inspiring both the artist and the art.
Creativity is a basic human capacity extending across all racial and cultural boundaries. In their diversity and their determination, the artists in this book show that the transforming illness is fundamental to humanity. What they have done during illness – and continue to do – is possible and available for everyone.
When the author Tobi Zausner was diagnosed with ovarian cancer in 1989, her doctor didn’t think she would last the year, but her life transformed – the wall of illness became a door of opportunity. Using fascinating and true stories of artists and drawing upon her own experience, Dr. Zausner offers methods for accessing your creative abilities. You too can turn a time of poor health into creative achievement and a more meaningful new life.
About the Author
Tobi Zausner is a research psychologist, a psychotherapist in private practice, and an award-winning visual artist with works in major museums and in private collections around the world. Dr. Zausner, who teaches at Saybrook University, publishes and lectures on the psychology of art and human potential. She is an officer on the Board of A.C.T.S (Arts, Crafts, and Theatre Safety), a non-profit organization investigating health hazards in the arts and her book, When Walls Become Doorways: Creativity and the Transforming Illness, highlights the influence of physical illness on the creative process of visual artists. A native New Yorker and an avid reader and walker, Dr. Zausner wishes there were more trees, grass, and hills in New York City.
- LanguageEnglish
- Publication dateApril 26, 2016
- File size1589 KB
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Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly
In her intriguing book about illness and its effects on creativity, artist Zausner writes: "Most of us swim on the surface of life until a storm of illness impels us to dive within and discover new sources of inspiration and strength—yet they were there waiting for us all the time." Zausner found her own life and art transformed after a 1989 diagnosis of ovarian cancer. This meditative and perceptive read is enriched by Zausner's wealth of knowledge about the lives of many artists she believes underwent similarly transforming illnesses. The practice of art, in her view, is healing, and convalescence can prompt budding artists to explore and more experienced artists to deepen their mastery. While Zausner discusses many contemporary artists, the sections on historical figures are the most vivid and surprising: looking at Leonardo da Vinci's work, she concludes that the great Renaissance artist struggled with ADD and dyslexia. Zausner also cites scholars who say Rembrandt had partial red/green color blindness and had to make do with a limited palette of mostly yellows and browns. The determination and ingenuity of these and many other artists in the face of physical problems is a humbling reminder that behind great art one can find painful—and inspirational—human stories. (Feb.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Review
"The book shows that what appears to be misfortune can become the opportunity to engage in a challenging process of deep creative flowering that could not have occurred without it." -- Phyllis K. Stein, Ph.D., Director, Washington University School of Medicine HRV (Heart Rate Variability) Lab
"This may be one of the greatest books about art ever written." -- Marianne Macy, Investigative Reporter
" marvelously heartening look at how illnesses and disabilities may have a creatively enlivening and even transformational effect on us. Expansive, broad-ranging and packed with often intimate information about artists. . .the book will be inspiring and helpful to anyone with health issues." -- Susan G. Wooldridge, author of Poemcrazy: Freeing Your Life with Words and Foolsgold: Making Something from Nothing
"This informative, insightful, and extensively researched study of how various illnesses transformed the lives of different artists, some famous others not, will educate, inspire, and gratify any reader." -- Garabed Eknoyan, M.D., Professor of Medicine Section of Nephrology, Baylor College of Medicine, Houston
From darkness to light, from pain to beauty; seeing how these artists transform illness can change lives. -- Ruth Richards. M.D., Ph.D., Saybrook Graduate School, San Francisco and Harvard Medical School
"This book is wonderful - a real treasure of information." -- Bruce L. Miller, M.D., A.W. & Mary Margaret Clausen Distinguished Professor University of California at San Francisco, School of Medicine
"This may be one of the greatest books about art ever written." -- Marianne Macy, Investigative Reporter
" marvelously heartening look at how illnesses and disabilities may have a creatively enlivening and even transformational effect on us. Expansive, broad-ranging and packed with often intimate information about artists. . .the book will be inspiring and helpful to anyone with health issues." -- Susan G. Wooldridge, author of Poemcrazy: Freeing Your Life with Words and Foolsgold: Making Something from Nothing
"This informative, insightful, and extensively researched study of how various illnesses transformed the lives of different artists, some famous others not, will educate, inspire, and gratify any reader." -- Garabed Eknoyan, M.D., Professor of Medicine Section of Nephrology, Baylor College of Medicine, Houston
From darkness to light, from pain to beauty; seeing how these artists transform illness can change lives. -- Ruth Richards. M.D., Ph.D., Saybrook Graduate School, San Francisco and Harvard Medical School
"This book is wonderful - a real treasure of information." -- Bruce L. Miller, M.D., A.W. & Mary Margaret Clausen Distinguished Professor University of California at San Francisco, School of Medicine
About the Author
TOBI ZAUSNER brings a unique combined perspective to this book. She has an interdisciplinary Ph.D. in art and psychology, is an award-winning artist, and is also an art historian. Dr. Zausner’s paintings, drawings, and prints have been exhibited in major museums and are represented in collections worldwide. She is on the board of A.C.T.S. (Arts, Crafts, and Theater Safety), a nonprofit organization investigating health hazards in the arts, and was chair of Art/Art History in the Society for Chaos Theory in Psychology and Life Sciences. Born and educated in New York, Dr. Zausner writes and lectures widely on the psychology of art. She teaches at the C. G. Jung Foundation and frequently speaks at charitable events and academic conferences.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Chapter 1
What Is a Transforming Illness?
Experts are those who pass through the forest of thorns.
—Zen proverb
What is a transforming illness and how does it work? Can anyone have a transforming illness? And why is creativity central to its effectiveness and so beneficial that artists choose to be creative when they are sick? The psychologist Henri Ellenberger calls the sickness preceding a breakthrough a “creative illness” since it affects productivity.1 I call it a “transforming illness” because the person changes as well as the work. The transforming illness is found throughout humankind, and we see it in shamans, who are the healers of their tribes. Mircea Eliade, the scholar of comparative religion, finds that shamans are only able to access their full abilities after recovering from an illness that transforms them.2 This chapter presents the components of a transforming illness and shows us how it acts to strengthen our lives.
Transforming Illness
A transforming illness is a time of poor health that profoundly alters your work, your outlook, and your life. It can occur at any age, from early childhood to the very end of existence, and can even happen more than once. It can also take many forms, but whether the transforming illness is a single episode of poor health or a chronic condition, things are never the same afterward. When the transforming illness occurs early in life, it can set the path for a future career; in adulthood it can alter a person’s way of living and working. Lawrence Alma-Tadema experienced both stages.
Lawrence Alma-Tadema (English, born in Holland, 1836–1912) wanted to be an artist since early childhood, but his family insisted that he become a lawyer.3 The stress of attending academic classes and making art in his spare time took its toll on the boy, and he contracted tuberculosis. Believing the illness to be terminal, doctors told the family that he should be permitted to do as he wished. Once Alma-Tadema was allowed to be creative without feeling pressured, his health returned and he became an artist. A second transforming illness came in 1870, when he was an established painter living in Brussels. None of the doctors there knew what was wrong, so a friend advised him to consult with the famous English surgeon Sir Henry Thompson. While in London to see Thompson, Alma-Tadema met his future wife. Later that year he settled in the city, and it became the place of his greatest success.
Even the end of life is not immune to a transforming illness. Intent to stay creative, artists will produce masterpieces in the face of immi-nent death. Ill from diabetes, Paul Cézanne (French, 1839–1906) wrote a letter to his son just days before he died.4 “I continue working with pains,” he admitted, “but finally something will come of it, and that is all that matters.”
Change during Illness
There are as many variations of transforming illnesses as there are people who have them. Everyone is a potential candidate because no one is immune either to illness or to change. Sometimes during illness change occurs in a split second of insight, that moment of epiphany when the veil drops away and your path becomes clear. At other times it is a gradual transition to a completely new life. Usually the creativity that starts during a transforming illness begins in convalescence, when the acute phase is over and extended rest produces a need to fill the empty hours. Changes can even begin before an illness, but then poor health accelerates the transformation. Specific illnesses can also pose their own problems. To overcome these obstacles, artists like Janet Sobel and Consuelo Gonzalez Amezcua change their mediums and alter their creative process in order to keep working.
Janet Sobel (American, born in Ukraine, 1894–1968) was an abstract artist who made drip paintings in the 1940s at the same time as Jackson Pollock.5 When Sobel became allergic to paints, she changed her medium to crayon and pencil. Expressing herself through colorful drawings, she left a large body of work. Consuelo González Amezcua (American, 1903–1975) also changed mediums because of her health.6 She was a sculptor who carved limestone into intricate designs by mixing imagery and abstraction. Amezcua developed breathing problems from inhaling rock dust, so she turned to drawing. By working on paper, she discovered her gift for color.
Physicians have recognized and written about the connection between illness, creativity, and self-transformation. In his book Creativity and Disease, the surgeon Philip Sandblom says, “In artists, the passion to create generates a will power strong enough to defy the worst disease.”7 And in his book Radical Healing, the psychiatrist Rudolph Ballentine writes, “Illness gives you the gift of helplessness, the overwhelming awareness that your way of being has, at least in some respects, failed.”8 He believes that an awareness of this situation offers opportunities for renewed health and fundamental change. Whenever a transforming illness occurs, it is a turning point in life, leaving you a different person from the one you were before. But this time of change before the new life begins may feel chaotic.
Illness as Chaos
Whenever we are sick and every time we are stressed we are in a state of chaos. The situation may not always look chaotic, but emo- tional and physical stress produce turmoil. And turmoil is chaos. Ilya Prigogine, who won the 1977 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his work on chaos theory, describes chaos as a state of turbulence in which things may appear disordered, but actually have an inherent structure that can produce new order.9 The transforming illness also looks disordered, but it too holds the seeds for a new existence. Illness appears to act like chaos in two ways. In an acute illness, a time of chaos comes, reorganizes our world, and leaves. In chronic illness, the chaos is ongoing, but artists like Dory Coffee persevere and their output increases.
Dory Coffee (American, b. 1942) has eye problems that impair her vision: pseudoexfoliation (flaking of the lens), glaucoma, and cataracts.10 As a result she has so many floaters in her visual field that they collect, forming cloudy spots. Resilient and persistent, Coffee fights her floaters with blinks that temporarily move them away. Her joyful, bright paintings reveal nothing of this constant struggle. “It’s a daily challenge,” she says, “but I continue to paint more than ever.”11
Chaos brings in the new. Our noisy, chaotic New Year’s Eve parties usher in the new year, and in Hinduism and the Judeo-Christian Gene- sis, there is a period of chaos before the new world takes form.12 We mirror creation through chaos whenever we are so upset that we feel impelled to change. During this period of inner chaos, which can be an experience of poor health, we are uncomfortable, but we also have a window of opportunity. Chaos theory is part of the science of nonlinear dynamics, but the transforming illness can also be explained using concepts from psychology.
Creativity as a Coping Mechanism
In psychology, the method we use to deal with a stressful event is called a coping mechanism. Using creativity to cope during poor health is a positive response to a difficult situation. Making a hard time more bearable is what the psychologist Salvatore R. Maddi calls transformational coping.13 It is central to a transforming illness.
The portrait and landscape artist Karen Koenig (American, 1938–1994) coped by using creativity in two separate ways. She was diagnosed with von Hippel–Lindau disease (VHL) in her late twenties.14 This rare genetic disorder affects the brain, eyes, spinal cord, kidneys, and, in its late stages, other parts of the body as well. At first she used painting to cope with the stress of illness. Even with diminishing sight in her left eye, Koenig continued to work using her right eye. When her right eye became impaired in 1992 and she could no longer paint, Koenig coped by writing poetry. “My art has been taken from me. . . . How could I endure?”she asked in a poem and then realized, “I could learn to cope.”15 She proudly stated, “I’m a fighter,” while creating poems about life, her family, her medical treatments, and her cat, Parpie. “I have somehow coped,” she wrote. “We will find ways. Life will still be good. Life will be different. But there are discoveries to be made at every juncture.”16
There are both positive and negative coping mechanisms. For example, improving nutrition in response to an illness is a healthy cop- ing mechanism; substance abuse is an unhealthy strategy. But even creativity itself can become a negative coping mechanism when it is used as an escape from reality to the detriment of your health; that is, if you ignored early warning signs of an illness and made art instead of going to a doctor. Creativity is an adjunct therapy that does not take the place of medical care; rather, it supplements that care in the pursuit of wellness. As creativity helps us cope through stress reduction and we make a difficult time more tolerable, we increase our hardiness.
Hardiness
Hardiness is the strength that helps us thrive despite obstacles. Maddi believes that hardiness has three components: commitment, control, and challenge.17 Although Maddi did his psychological research in the corporate environment, his findings relate to creativity. Commitment, which is involvement, is an artist’s commitment to work. Control is inherent in the decisions about what will or will not appear in the work of art. And challenge is a constant in the creative process where problems are continually met and solved in the course of a work. Because creative activity contains the three components of hardiness, I believe that it can not only increase hardiness but produce hardiness as well.
Creating hardiness through commitment, control, and challenge is very important to people who have suffered prejudice. For them, creativity can build a sense of self-worth. Sylvia Fragoso (American, b. 1962) is an artist with Down syndrome who paints at the National Institute of Art and Disabilities (NIAD) in Richmond, California. Founded by the psychologist Elias Katz and his late wife, the art teacher Florence Ludins-Katz, NIAD has a spacious studio where challenged people make art and also have a chance to sell their work.18 Painting at NIAD has given Fragoso both hardiness and self-esteem. “I am an artist,” she says and sees herself as a practicing professional.19
Hardiness is especially important during illness, when adversity can be a constant companion. According to the American Psychological Association, hardiness helps both our physical and our mental health and is the key to resilience.20
Resilience
Resilience is our ability to adapt to new circumstances when life has changed in ways we could not have predicted and would not have chosen. It is the development of strength during a time of hardship. Resilience is our capacity to thrive despite major life stresses that could seriously threaten us. In their study of children born to underprivileged families on Hawaii’s island of Kauai, the psychologists Emmy Werner and Ruth Smith show that even in the face of great risks, there are still individuals who will have successful, rewarding lives.21 They are the resilient ones. Despite multiple problems at home, in school, and in the workplace, they overcome their difficulties and thrive. The artists portrayed in this book use creativity as a tool for resilience, to overcome adverse physical conditions.
Ezekiel Gibbs (American, 1889–1992) says his father came from Africa “around the end of slavery times” and his mother was a Cherokee.22 Originally a farmer, Gibbs started painting at the age of eighty-three and spoke about resilience in the face of physical exhaustion. “Sometimes, when I think I’m just about played out, I sit down and rest awhile,” he explained. “Then I just go to it again. You just have to keep on doing whatever you are doing.”23 It worked for him. Gibbs continued to paint until his death at age 103; he was believed to have been the oldest self-taught artist living and working in America.
The psychiatrist Michael Rutter describes resilience as a dynamic process containing protective mechanisms that modify the response to risk, lessen vulnerability, and generate turning points in life.24 Using Rutter’s model, we see that creativity is also a dynamic process that can be used as a protective mechanism, generating turning points in both life and art. It also modifies the response to risk and lessens vulnerability because it releases stress and builds strength. It releases stress by allowing you to enter the world of art, where physical problems seem to diminish, and it builds strength through the achievement of goals met and tasks accomplished.
Self-Efficacy and Mastery
Because it is a dynamic process, creativity is not only a tool for resiliency, but can generate what the psychologist Albert Bandura calls “self-efficacy.”25 Self-efficacy is the way we perceive ourselves and our belief that the things we do make a difference. These beliefs inspire motivation and determine our behavior. The best way to strengthen our sense of self-efficacy is through success and the experience of mastery. Mastery is success in performing a task or in the outcome of a situation. The artists in this book achieve self-efficacy through the experience of mastery by creating art despite physical challenges. The sculptor Michael Gregory acquired this ability through effort.
Michael Gregory (American, 1951–1995) believed he had to work twice as hard to succeed because of the prejudice against him. “One, I’m legally blind since birth,” he stated, “and two, I’m black.” Unable to see well, he worked with clay, a medium he could feel. Through effort and talent Gregory went from can collector to prize-winning sculptor featured on television and in newspapers. “If you don’t try,” Gregory insisted, “you don’t know what you can do.”26
According to Bandura, people find stress less upsetting if they think they can cope with it. One of the primary ways creativity helps artists cope is through compensation.
Artistic Projection as a Method of Compensation
A compensation response is an act of doing something to make up for something else that is missing. My clear style of painting is my compensation response to the blurred world I see without corrective lenses. But there is an additional aspect of compensation in art that seems magical but is really psychological. It occurs during what I call artistic projection: artists project themselves and what they desire into what they are creating; as a result, they are able to forget their physical condition at the time. Artistic projection differs from Freud’s concept of an individual unconsciously projecting his or her thoughts onto another person.27
Artistic projection is a powerful experience because the work of art becomes a kind of virtual reality for artists. When artists draw or paint something, a psychological aspect of their being is projected into what they are making, and they actually sense themselves in their creations. When I draw a leg or a hand, I feel that leg or hand as I make it appear: there is a connection between me and what I create. Projecting oneself into a work of art is so intrinsic to artistic experience that it is routinely used in both Eastern and Western art education. My drawing and anatomy teacher at the Art Students League in New York City told us to “feel” the muscles in the bodies we drew. And when the eighth-century painter Han Kan (Chinese, d. 780) created a horse, “he became a horse.”28 Classical Japanese painting calls this concept sei do, or “living movement,” and insists artists must completely feel and experience as reality everything they create in a work of art.29
Artistic projection and the need for compensation can fuse in the creative process. Compensation through artistic projection is extremely rewarding because it is so convincing to the artist. There is a stronger experience of compensation when creating a work of art than looking at it after completion. This is because when we paint something we are enveloped in the moment of its creation, becoming what we paint as it appears.
The Intensity of Artistic Projection
The feeling of projection is so intense that it becomes the artist’s total world in that moment, blocking out all other stimuli. By forming a protective wall around the artist, artistic projection becomes a shield, creating a place where the outside world seems not to exist. Only what is currently being created seems real to the artist. In this reality the artist controls and partakes of everything, including the desired feeling of compensation. Satisfied, the artist continues to work to extend this experience as long as possible.
After a traffic accident damaged her health, Frida Kahlo (Mexi- can, 1907–1954) sought compensation in her art. “As the accident changed my path,” she related, “many things prevented me from fulfilling the desires which everyone considers normal, and to me nothing seemed more normal than to paint what had not been fulfilled.”30 Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec (French, 1864–1901) walked with great difficulty, and although he loved horses, he was unable to ride. Instead he created horses in his art. By drawing a horse, an artist becomes that horse during the creative process. As the horse leaps on canvas, part of Toulouse-Lautrec leaps with it—free if only for a short time from the confines of his physical limitations.
We all want things that are not currently in our lives, things that may even seem beyond our grasp. But compensation through creativity is a way for us to feel they are obtainable. Painting these desires gives our art enormous strength. Without an artist’s longing and projection, the finished work is not as strong. There is less caring and less of the artist involved. Compensation and projection inspire masterpieces by bringing intensity and power to a work of art.
The Flow Experience
One of the most enjoyable aspects of the creative process is the experience of flow. The psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi describes flow as a time when we are totally absorbed and happy in an activity.31 He connects this to creativity and says it happens when we are in the flow of things, when goals are clear, challenges are balanced by skills, and self-consciousness fades away. People in a state of flow feel motivated and are so deeply involved in their activity that it blocks out distractions from the external world.
The Renaissance artist Francesco Mazzola (Italian, 1503–1540), known as Parmigianino, gives us an extreme example of the flow state. The year was 1527 and Parmigianino was in his studio and so engrossed in painting that he was oblivious to the Sack of Rome that was going on in the streets outside.32 He noticed nothing until the Germans were already in his house. They were so taken with his art that instead of pillaging they only asked for some watercolor drawings and left him unharmed.
Although not everyone may be able to block out the Sack of Rome, experiencing flow is a welcome relief for a person who is ill because it can lessen the sensation of pain. Flow shares some of its aspects with artistic projection and compensation, such as the motivation to continue working and the experience of total absorption in an activity. It is possible that these states may overlap. An artist who is experiencing compensation during artistic projection may also be in a state of flow. The experience of flow may be widespread because we are all capable of creativity.
Everyday Creativity and Eminent Creativity
Creativity is possible for everyone because we are inherently creative. It is part of being human. Every choice we make in life is based on a decision, and the decision is a creative response to the conditions at that moment. The psychiatrist Ruth Richards calls this everyday creativity and says we use this capacity whenever we improvise or cope with life during our many complex tasks, such as raising children, cooking food, solving problems at work, and landscaping the yard.33 We can also activate our innate creativity during times of stress like physical illness.
Quentin Massys (Flemish, ca. 1465–1530)34 and David Cox (English, 1783–1859)35 were blacksmiths who started their careers as painters with everyday creativity. Massys had an illness that required extensive bed rest and Cox broke his leg. As a result, neither of them could work at the forge. But both began making art in response to the boredom of convalescence, not realizing it would become their career. Through continued effort, their everyday creativity turned into eminent creativity, which is the activity of professional artists. Everyday creativity and eminent creativity are not opposites but form a continuum of achievement in the creative process. No one starts by making masterpieces. Beginning work, even for the most eminent artists, is closer to everyday creativity and it is only through effort that genius can emerge.
When a coping mechanism becomes a tool for personal growth, everyday creativity can change into eminent creativity. The psychologist Celeste Rhodes36 says that art created to counteract feelings of dep- rivation can evolve into an achievement of excellence that leads to a more fulfilling life.
Creativity as Both Healing and Necessary
Creative activity becomes a vacation from the negative aspects of our lives. Immersed in a project, we may no longer be aware of our illness or stress. The psychologist Howard Gardner finds that work is so important to creative people that they do not thrive without it. We see this in the lives of George Tooker and Otto Bluemner.37
As a child George Tooker (American, b. 1920) suffered from a chronically inflamed appendix and ulcerative colitis.38 But when he was allowed to make art during convalescences, the symptoms would go away. Although Tooker was given art lessons, his parents wanted him to work in finance like his father, a municipal bond broker. Acceding to family pressure, he went to Harvard and then to Marine Corps Officers Candidate School. There Tooker’s ulcerative colitis worsened drastically and in a few months he was discharged. After this serious illness, his parents relented and allowed him to become a painter. Making art dramatically improved his health. George Tooker is now eighty-seven and still painting.
Oscar Bluemner (American, born in Germany, 1867–1938) was not as fortunate.39 Trained as an architect, Bluemner turned to painting and became a pioneer of modern art. In January 1935, he was badly injured in a car accident, and the next year his heart and his eyesight began to fail. A doctor concerned about Bluemner’s poor health made a grave mistake—he insisted that the artist stop painting. Sick, in financial trouble, and forbidden to paint, Bluemner told friends he had lived beyond his usefulness. On January 12, 1938, he took his own life.
Art as Therapy
The healing aspect of creativity forms the core of art therapy. Kerry Smallwood, a breast cancer survivor, called the UCLA art therapy program “the most important non medical thing I did. . . . It was very powerful how the artwork accessed deeper emotions.”40 Making art can also help physical recovery. Through drawing and painting, a person may regain motor skills that had been lost or learn new ones to take their place. For the painter Trevor Wells, creativity that started in a hospital rehabilitation program became the beginning of a lifetime in art.
Trevor Wells (English, b. 1956) was a twenty-one-year-old apprentice carpenter when a rugby accident broke his neck at the fourth cervical vertebra.41 Paralyzed from the neck down, Wells was a patient in a long-term care facility when someone suggested he try painting. “I had no interest in art,” he recalls, but “it would help to pass the time and I agreed to give it a try.” As a quadriplegic, he held his brush in a mouthstick. The first two paintings were not very good, “but when I was on my third picture, I was amazed,” insists Wells. “I was actually painting.”42 He is now a member of the Mouth and Foot Painting Artists and creates landscapes that have earned him an international reputation.
The artists in this book accomplish their goals one small victory after another, until they add up to a great success. These victories are not triumphs over other individuals but over setbacks that keep us from fulfillment. This is a path open to everyone that hurts no one. We all have the potential for achievement, but it can sometimes lie dormant until illness provides the strength. Then, like Henri Matisse, we can triumph over adversity.
Henri Matisse
Few artists have had their life and work so affected by poor health as Henri Matisse (French, 1869–1954).43 From his early years until his death at eighty-four, five transforming illnesses molded both the artist and his art.
The First Transforming Illness
Matisse’s first transforming illness happened when he was a twenty-year-old law clerk. The chronic intestinal problems that had plagued him since childhood flared into an acute attack.44 Whether it was appendicitis, ulcerative colitis, or a hernia, we will probably never know, but at that time the conditions were inoperable and rest was the only alternative.45 A man in the next hospital bed recommended that Matisse try his hand at chromos to pass the time. Chromos were an early type of painting by numbers, and although his father disapproved, his artistic mother bought him two small chromos and a box of paints. “The moment I had this box of colors in my hands,” revealed Matisse, “I had the feeling that my life was there.”46
Before then, nothing had interested him, but from that moment on he thought only of painting. On returning to the law office, he would get up at dawn each morning to go to art class before work. Then, after a quick lunch, he would paint at midday, and again after six o’clock in the evening. Finally summoning his courage, Matisse begged his parents for permission to study art in Paris. In her biography of the artist, Hilary Spurling notes that at this point in his life Matisse was seen as a double failure. First, as a sickly child, he was deemed unfit to take over his father’s successful grain and hardware business, so his younger brother August was chosen instead. Now he had failed again by not wanting to be a lawyer. His father was furious, but his mother interceded, and Matisse was allowed to go. As the train pulled out of the station, his father stood there, waving his fists and shouting, “You’ll starve!”47
The Second Transforming Illness
The surgeon Philip Sandblom finds that Matisse’s second transforming illness came when the artist was in his late forties.48 Matisse was living in the windy town of l’Estaque. “I had caught bronchitis there,” he recalled, “and I came to Nice to cure it.”49 Nice is known for its excellent weather, but it rained for a month after Matisse arrived and finally he decided to leave. The very next day the sun came out and it was so beautiful that he said, “I decided not to leave Nice, and have stayed there practically for the rest of my life.”50 Sandblom notes that moving changed Matisse’s work, and “a very personal resplendent coloring was brought forth.”51 The bright sun in Nice enhanced the palette of one of the greatest colorists in the history of art.
The Third Transforming Illness
Matisse’s third transforming illness, intestinal cancer, came at the age of seventy. After an operation to remove the cancerous blockage, he had two pulmonary embolisms, the flu, and a prolapsed stomach, and remained an invalid for the rest of his life. Only able to stand for brief periods of time but unwilling to stop working, Matisse began to make art from his bed and from his wheelchair. While lying in bed he started to draw on the walls. Then he attached a piece of charcoal to a long bamboo fishing pole so he could draw on the ceiling. But these were black-and-white images and Matisse wanted to work in color.
Sitting in his wheelchair with scissors in hand, he began to cut brightly colored pieces of paper into a variety of shapes and sizes. “I call this drawing with scissors,”52 explained Matisse, who directed his assistants to place the shapes on large sheets of white paper, or on canvases, or sometimes even on the wall. His home became full of colorful forms that soared and danced from room to room. By creating art that moved for him, Matisse compensated for his lack of mobility. With these brightly colored pieces of paper, a part of Matisse was no longer sitting in his wheelchair or lying on his bed. Through artistic projection, he was up leaping and swirling with the dancing paper forms. These cutouts are among the best works of art he ever produced.
The Fourth Transforming Illness
Matisse’s fourth transforming illness happened soon after the intestinal surgery. According to Sandblom, the artist developed gallstones, and for over a year suffered from jaundice, fever, and severe pain.53 Both stoic and stubborn, Matisse remembered his last operation and chose continued pain over the danger of surgical complications. And he kept on working. He was doing linoleum-cut illustrations for a book, and they took him “ten months of effort,” said Matisse, “working all day and often at night.”54 Sandblom notes that in only one of these illustrations, Increasing Anguish, do we see the artist’s suffering. A curving white outline shows the profile of a person in distress. With its mouth wide open and its head thrown back, the figure cries out for an artist who silently sublimates his pain into work. Of all the book illustrations, this one is the best known.
The Fifth Transforming Illness
In 1942 Matisse had his fifth transforming illness. During the years after the operation his condition was sometimes stable while at other times it was poor. In an article for the New York Times, Alan Riding describes a new creative effort that began when the artist was so sick that he needed a night nurse. Monique Bourgeois, a young woman who lived nearby and was planning to be a nun, answered the request to work for him. Five years later, as Sister Jacques-Marie in the Dominican order, she had an idea that a chapel should be built in Vence, a town in the south of France, and asked Matisse to be the designer.
Matisse worked for four years on this project, called the Chapel of the Rosary. A small, exquisite structure, it is only twenty feet wide by fifty-nine feet long and sixteen feet high. He designed its stained-glass windows, a mural for the Stations of the Cross, the altar, the priest’s vestments, and also planned the architecture with the help of one of the Dominican monks, Brother Raysiguier. The artist remarked that he had always lived a very secular life, but now near its end came a project for the divine. Matisse was eighty-one years old when the chapel was complete, and he said, “I consider it to be my masterpiece.”55 Illness and Determination
When the doctors gave up on him after the cancer operation, Matisse never gave up on himself—and he lived another thirteen and a half years. “Whether you can or not, you hold on,” the artist said, and “when you’re out of will power you call on stubbornness.”56 He was also grateful to be alive. “The time you live from now on is a gift from life itself—each year, each month, each day.” 57
Matisse felt that art was healing. When his friends were sick, he would have his work hung around their beds, convinced the vibrant colors would help them get well. He insisted that we should create both from our strengths and from our weakness because what we think is our weakness is often our greatest strength. “Only what I created after the illness,” revealed Matisse, “constitutes my real self.”58
Changing a Time of Sickness into a Transforming Illness
For Matisse and for us, poor health may hold the key to insight and evolution. When that happens, we transform. The next chapter explains how to unlock a difficult situation and turn a time of sickness into a transforming illness.
What Is a Transforming Illness?
Experts are those who pass through the forest of thorns.
—Zen proverb
What is a transforming illness and how does it work? Can anyone have a transforming illness? And why is creativity central to its effectiveness and so beneficial that artists choose to be creative when they are sick? The psychologist Henri Ellenberger calls the sickness preceding a breakthrough a “creative illness” since it affects productivity.1 I call it a “transforming illness” because the person changes as well as the work. The transforming illness is found throughout humankind, and we see it in shamans, who are the healers of their tribes. Mircea Eliade, the scholar of comparative religion, finds that shamans are only able to access their full abilities after recovering from an illness that transforms them.2 This chapter presents the components of a transforming illness and shows us how it acts to strengthen our lives.
Transforming Illness
A transforming illness is a time of poor health that profoundly alters your work, your outlook, and your life. It can occur at any age, from early childhood to the very end of existence, and can even happen more than once. It can also take many forms, but whether the transforming illness is a single episode of poor health or a chronic condition, things are never the same afterward. When the transforming illness occurs early in life, it can set the path for a future career; in adulthood it can alter a person’s way of living and working. Lawrence Alma-Tadema experienced both stages.
Lawrence Alma-Tadema (English, born in Holland, 1836–1912) wanted to be an artist since early childhood, but his family insisted that he become a lawyer.3 The stress of attending academic classes and making art in his spare time took its toll on the boy, and he contracted tuberculosis. Believing the illness to be terminal, doctors told the family that he should be permitted to do as he wished. Once Alma-Tadema was allowed to be creative without feeling pressured, his health returned and he became an artist. A second transforming illness came in 1870, when he was an established painter living in Brussels. None of the doctors there knew what was wrong, so a friend advised him to consult with the famous English surgeon Sir Henry Thompson. While in London to see Thompson, Alma-Tadema met his future wife. Later that year he settled in the city, and it became the place of his greatest success.
Even the end of life is not immune to a transforming illness. Intent to stay creative, artists will produce masterpieces in the face of immi-nent death. Ill from diabetes, Paul Cézanne (French, 1839–1906) wrote a letter to his son just days before he died.4 “I continue working with pains,” he admitted, “but finally something will come of it, and that is all that matters.”
Change during Illness
There are as many variations of transforming illnesses as there are people who have them. Everyone is a potential candidate because no one is immune either to illness or to change. Sometimes during illness change occurs in a split second of insight, that moment of epiphany when the veil drops away and your path becomes clear. At other times it is a gradual transition to a completely new life. Usually the creativity that starts during a transforming illness begins in convalescence, when the acute phase is over and extended rest produces a need to fill the empty hours. Changes can even begin before an illness, but then poor health accelerates the transformation. Specific illnesses can also pose their own problems. To overcome these obstacles, artists like Janet Sobel and Consuelo Gonzalez Amezcua change their mediums and alter their creative process in order to keep working.
Janet Sobel (American, born in Ukraine, 1894–1968) was an abstract artist who made drip paintings in the 1940s at the same time as Jackson Pollock.5 When Sobel became allergic to paints, she changed her medium to crayon and pencil. Expressing herself through colorful drawings, she left a large body of work. Consuelo González Amezcua (American, 1903–1975) also changed mediums because of her health.6 She was a sculptor who carved limestone into intricate designs by mixing imagery and abstraction. Amezcua developed breathing problems from inhaling rock dust, so she turned to drawing. By working on paper, she discovered her gift for color.
Physicians have recognized and written about the connection between illness, creativity, and self-transformation. In his book Creativity and Disease, the surgeon Philip Sandblom says, “In artists, the passion to create generates a will power strong enough to defy the worst disease.”7 And in his book Radical Healing, the psychiatrist Rudolph Ballentine writes, “Illness gives you the gift of helplessness, the overwhelming awareness that your way of being has, at least in some respects, failed.”8 He believes that an awareness of this situation offers opportunities for renewed health and fundamental change. Whenever a transforming illness occurs, it is a turning point in life, leaving you a different person from the one you were before. But this time of change before the new life begins may feel chaotic.
Illness as Chaos
Whenever we are sick and every time we are stressed we are in a state of chaos. The situation may not always look chaotic, but emo- tional and physical stress produce turmoil. And turmoil is chaos. Ilya Prigogine, who won the 1977 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his work on chaos theory, describes chaos as a state of turbulence in which things may appear disordered, but actually have an inherent structure that can produce new order.9 The transforming illness also looks disordered, but it too holds the seeds for a new existence. Illness appears to act like chaos in two ways. In an acute illness, a time of chaos comes, reorganizes our world, and leaves. In chronic illness, the chaos is ongoing, but artists like Dory Coffee persevere and their output increases.
Dory Coffee (American, b. 1942) has eye problems that impair her vision: pseudoexfoliation (flaking of the lens), glaucoma, and cataracts.10 As a result she has so many floaters in her visual field that they collect, forming cloudy spots. Resilient and persistent, Coffee fights her floaters with blinks that temporarily move them away. Her joyful, bright paintings reveal nothing of this constant struggle. “It’s a daily challenge,” she says, “but I continue to paint more than ever.”11
Chaos brings in the new. Our noisy, chaotic New Year’s Eve parties usher in the new year, and in Hinduism and the Judeo-Christian Gene- sis, there is a period of chaos before the new world takes form.12 We mirror creation through chaos whenever we are so upset that we feel impelled to change. During this period of inner chaos, which can be an experience of poor health, we are uncomfortable, but we also have a window of opportunity. Chaos theory is part of the science of nonlinear dynamics, but the transforming illness can also be explained using concepts from psychology.
Creativity as a Coping Mechanism
In psychology, the method we use to deal with a stressful event is called a coping mechanism. Using creativity to cope during poor health is a positive response to a difficult situation. Making a hard time more bearable is what the psychologist Salvatore R. Maddi calls transformational coping.13 It is central to a transforming illness.
The portrait and landscape artist Karen Koenig (American, 1938–1994) coped by using creativity in two separate ways. She was diagnosed with von Hippel–Lindau disease (VHL) in her late twenties.14 This rare genetic disorder affects the brain, eyes, spinal cord, kidneys, and, in its late stages, other parts of the body as well. At first she used painting to cope with the stress of illness. Even with diminishing sight in her left eye, Koenig continued to work using her right eye. When her right eye became impaired in 1992 and she could no longer paint, Koenig coped by writing poetry. “My art has been taken from me. . . . How could I endure?”she asked in a poem and then realized, “I could learn to cope.”15 She proudly stated, “I’m a fighter,” while creating poems about life, her family, her medical treatments, and her cat, Parpie. “I have somehow coped,” she wrote. “We will find ways. Life will still be good. Life will be different. But there are discoveries to be made at every juncture.”16
There are both positive and negative coping mechanisms. For example, improving nutrition in response to an illness is a healthy cop- ing mechanism; substance abuse is an unhealthy strategy. But even creativity itself can become a negative coping mechanism when it is used as an escape from reality to the detriment of your health; that is, if you ignored early warning signs of an illness and made art instead of going to a doctor. Creativity is an adjunct therapy that does not take the place of medical care; rather, it supplements that care in the pursuit of wellness. As creativity helps us cope through stress reduction and we make a difficult time more tolerable, we increase our hardiness.
Hardiness
Hardiness is the strength that helps us thrive despite obstacles. Maddi believes that hardiness has three components: commitment, control, and challenge.17 Although Maddi did his psychological research in the corporate environment, his findings relate to creativity. Commitment, which is involvement, is an artist’s commitment to work. Control is inherent in the decisions about what will or will not appear in the work of art. And challenge is a constant in the creative process where problems are continually met and solved in the course of a work. Because creative activity contains the three components of hardiness, I believe that it can not only increase hardiness but produce hardiness as well.
Creating hardiness through commitment, control, and challenge is very important to people who have suffered prejudice. For them, creativity can build a sense of self-worth. Sylvia Fragoso (American, b. 1962) is an artist with Down syndrome who paints at the National Institute of Art and Disabilities (NIAD) in Richmond, California. Founded by the psychologist Elias Katz and his late wife, the art teacher Florence Ludins-Katz, NIAD has a spacious studio where challenged people make art and also have a chance to sell their work.18 Painting at NIAD has given Fragoso both hardiness and self-esteem. “I am an artist,” she says and sees herself as a practicing professional.19
Hardiness is especially important during illness, when adversity can be a constant companion. According to the American Psychological Association, hardiness helps both our physical and our mental health and is the key to resilience.20
Resilience
Resilience is our ability to adapt to new circumstances when life has changed in ways we could not have predicted and would not have chosen. It is the development of strength during a time of hardship. Resilience is our capacity to thrive despite major life stresses that could seriously threaten us. In their study of children born to underprivileged families on Hawaii’s island of Kauai, the psychologists Emmy Werner and Ruth Smith show that even in the face of great risks, there are still individuals who will have successful, rewarding lives.21 They are the resilient ones. Despite multiple problems at home, in school, and in the workplace, they overcome their difficulties and thrive. The artists portrayed in this book use creativity as a tool for resilience, to overcome adverse physical conditions.
Ezekiel Gibbs (American, 1889–1992) says his father came from Africa “around the end of slavery times” and his mother was a Cherokee.22 Originally a farmer, Gibbs started painting at the age of eighty-three and spoke about resilience in the face of physical exhaustion. “Sometimes, when I think I’m just about played out, I sit down and rest awhile,” he explained. “Then I just go to it again. You just have to keep on doing whatever you are doing.”23 It worked for him. Gibbs continued to paint until his death at age 103; he was believed to have been the oldest self-taught artist living and working in America.
The psychiatrist Michael Rutter describes resilience as a dynamic process containing protective mechanisms that modify the response to risk, lessen vulnerability, and generate turning points in life.24 Using Rutter’s model, we see that creativity is also a dynamic process that can be used as a protective mechanism, generating turning points in both life and art. It also modifies the response to risk and lessens vulnerability because it releases stress and builds strength. It releases stress by allowing you to enter the world of art, where physical problems seem to diminish, and it builds strength through the achievement of goals met and tasks accomplished.
Self-Efficacy and Mastery
Because it is a dynamic process, creativity is not only a tool for resiliency, but can generate what the psychologist Albert Bandura calls “self-efficacy.”25 Self-efficacy is the way we perceive ourselves and our belief that the things we do make a difference. These beliefs inspire motivation and determine our behavior. The best way to strengthen our sense of self-efficacy is through success and the experience of mastery. Mastery is success in performing a task or in the outcome of a situation. The artists in this book achieve self-efficacy through the experience of mastery by creating art despite physical challenges. The sculptor Michael Gregory acquired this ability through effort.
Michael Gregory (American, 1951–1995) believed he had to work twice as hard to succeed because of the prejudice against him. “One, I’m legally blind since birth,” he stated, “and two, I’m black.” Unable to see well, he worked with clay, a medium he could feel. Through effort and talent Gregory went from can collector to prize-winning sculptor featured on television and in newspapers. “If you don’t try,” Gregory insisted, “you don’t know what you can do.”26
According to Bandura, people find stress less upsetting if they think they can cope with it. One of the primary ways creativity helps artists cope is through compensation.
Artistic Projection as a Method of Compensation
A compensation response is an act of doing something to make up for something else that is missing. My clear style of painting is my compensation response to the blurred world I see without corrective lenses. But there is an additional aspect of compensation in art that seems magical but is really psychological. It occurs during what I call artistic projection: artists project themselves and what they desire into what they are creating; as a result, they are able to forget their physical condition at the time. Artistic projection differs from Freud’s concept of an individual unconsciously projecting his or her thoughts onto another person.27
Artistic projection is a powerful experience because the work of art becomes a kind of virtual reality for artists. When artists draw or paint something, a psychological aspect of their being is projected into what they are making, and they actually sense themselves in their creations. When I draw a leg or a hand, I feel that leg or hand as I make it appear: there is a connection between me and what I create. Projecting oneself into a work of art is so intrinsic to artistic experience that it is routinely used in both Eastern and Western art education. My drawing and anatomy teacher at the Art Students League in New York City told us to “feel” the muscles in the bodies we drew. And when the eighth-century painter Han Kan (Chinese, d. 780) created a horse, “he became a horse.”28 Classical Japanese painting calls this concept sei do, or “living movement,” and insists artists must completely feel and experience as reality everything they create in a work of art.29
Artistic projection and the need for compensation can fuse in the creative process. Compensation through artistic projection is extremely rewarding because it is so convincing to the artist. There is a stronger experience of compensation when creating a work of art than looking at it after completion. This is because when we paint something we are enveloped in the moment of its creation, becoming what we paint as it appears.
The Intensity of Artistic Projection
The feeling of projection is so intense that it becomes the artist’s total world in that moment, blocking out all other stimuli. By forming a protective wall around the artist, artistic projection becomes a shield, creating a place where the outside world seems not to exist. Only what is currently being created seems real to the artist. In this reality the artist controls and partakes of everything, including the desired feeling of compensation. Satisfied, the artist continues to work to extend this experience as long as possible.
After a traffic accident damaged her health, Frida Kahlo (Mexi- can, 1907–1954) sought compensation in her art. “As the accident changed my path,” she related, “many things prevented me from fulfilling the desires which everyone considers normal, and to me nothing seemed more normal than to paint what had not been fulfilled.”30 Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec (French, 1864–1901) walked with great difficulty, and although he loved horses, he was unable to ride. Instead he created horses in his art. By drawing a horse, an artist becomes that horse during the creative process. As the horse leaps on canvas, part of Toulouse-Lautrec leaps with it—free if only for a short time from the confines of his physical limitations.
We all want things that are not currently in our lives, things that may even seem beyond our grasp. But compensation through creativity is a way for us to feel they are obtainable. Painting these desires gives our art enormous strength. Without an artist’s longing and projection, the finished work is not as strong. There is less caring and less of the artist involved. Compensation and projection inspire masterpieces by bringing intensity and power to a work of art.
The Flow Experience
One of the most enjoyable aspects of the creative process is the experience of flow. The psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi describes flow as a time when we are totally absorbed and happy in an activity.31 He connects this to creativity and says it happens when we are in the flow of things, when goals are clear, challenges are balanced by skills, and self-consciousness fades away. People in a state of flow feel motivated and are so deeply involved in their activity that it blocks out distractions from the external world.
The Renaissance artist Francesco Mazzola (Italian, 1503–1540), known as Parmigianino, gives us an extreme example of the flow state. The year was 1527 and Parmigianino was in his studio and so engrossed in painting that he was oblivious to the Sack of Rome that was going on in the streets outside.32 He noticed nothing until the Germans were already in his house. They were so taken with his art that instead of pillaging they only asked for some watercolor drawings and left him unharmed.
Although not everyone may be able to block out the Sack of Rome, experiencing flow is a welcome relief for a person who is ill because it can lessen the sensation of pain. Flow shares some of its aspects with artistic projection and compensation, such as the motivation to continue working and the experience of total absorption in an activity. It is possible that these states may overlap. An artist who is experiencing compensation during artistic projection may also be in a state of flow. The experience of flow may be widespread because we are all capable of creativity.
Everyday Creativity and Eminent Creativity
Creativity is possible for everyone because we are inherently creative. It is part of being human. Every choice we make in life is based on a decision, and the decision is a creative response to the conditions at that moment. The psychiatrist Ruth Richards calls this everyday creativity and says we use this capacity whenever we improvise or cope with life during our many complex tasks, such as raising children, cooking food, solving problems at work, and landscaping the yard.33 We can also activate our innate creativity during times of stress like physical illness.
Quentin Massys (Flemish, ca. 1465–1530)34 and David Cox (English, 1783–1859)35 were blacksmiths who started their careers as painters with everyday creativity. Massys had an illness that required extensive bed rest and Cox broke his leg. As a result, neither of them could work at the forge. But both began making art in response to the boredom of convalescence, not realizing it would become their career. Through continued effort, their everyday creativity turned into eminent creativity, which is the activity of professional artists. Everyday creativity and eminent creativity are not opposites but form a continuum of achievement in the creative process. No one starts by making masterpieces. Beginning work, even for the most eminent artists, is closer to everyday creativity and it is only through effort that genius can emerge.
When a coping mechanism becomes a tool for personal growth, everyday creativity can change into eminent creativity. The psychologist Celeste Rhodes36 says that art created to counteract feelings of dep- rivation can evolve into an achievement of excellence that leads to a more fulfilling life.
Creativity as Both Healing and Necessary
Creative activity becomes a vacation from the negative aspects of our lives. Immersed in a project, we may no longer be aware of our illness or stress. The psychologist Howard Gardner finds that work is so important to creative people that they do not thrive without it. We see this in the lives of George Tooker and Otto Bluemner.37
As a child George Tooker (American, b. 1920) suffered from a chronically inflamed appendix and ulcerative colitis.38 But when he was allowed to make art during convalescences, the symptoms would go away. Although Tooker was given art lessons, his parents wanted him to work in finance like his father, a municipal bond broker. Acceding to family pressure, he went to Harvard and then to Marine Corps Officers Candidate School. There Tooker’s ulcerative colitis worsened drastically and in a few months he was discharged. After this serious illness, his parents relented and allowed him to become a painter. Making art dramatically improved his health. George Tooker is now eighty-seven and still painting.
Oscar Bluemner (American, born in Germany, 1867–1938) was not as fortunate.39 Trained as an architect, Bluemner turned to painting and became a pioneer of modern art. In January 1935, he was badly injured in a car accident, and the next year his heart and his eyesight began to fail. A doctor concerned about Bluemner’s poor health made a grave mistake—he insisted that the artist stop painting. Sick, in financial trouble, and forbidden to paint, Bluemner told friends he had lived beyond his usefulness. On January 12, 1938, he took his own life.
Art as Therapy
The healing aspect of creativity forms the core of art therapy. Kerry Smallwood, a breast cancer survivor, called the UCLA art therapy program “the most important non medical thing I did. . . . It was very powerful how the artwork accessed deeper emotions.”40 Making art can also help physical recovery. Through drawing and painting, a person may regain motor skills that had been lost or learn new ones to take their place. For the painter Trevor Wells, creativity that started in a hospital rehabilitation program became the beginning of a lifetime in art.
Trevor Wells (English, b. 1956) was a twenty-one-year-old apprentice carpenter when a rugby accident broke his neck at the fourth cervical vertebra.41 Paralyzed from the neck down, Wells was a patient in a long-term care facility when someone suggested he try painting. “I had no interest in art,” he recalls, but “it would help to pass the time and I agreed to give it a try.” As a quadriplegic, he held his brush in a mouthstick. The first two paintings were not very good, “but when I was on my third picture, I was amazed,” insists Wells. “I was actually painting.”42 He is now a member of the Mouth and Foot Painting Artists and creates landscapes that have earned him an international reputation.
The artists in this book accomplish their goals one small victory after another, until they add up to a great success. These victories are not triumphs over other individuals but over setbacks that keep us from fulfillment. This is a path open to everyone that hurts no one. We all have the potential for achievement, but it can sometimes lie dormant until illness provides the strength. Then, like Henri Matisse, we can triumph over adversity.
Henri Matisse
Few artists have had their life and work so affected by poor health as Henri Matisse (French, 1869–1954).43 From his early years until his death at eighty-four, five transforming illnesses molded both the artist and his art.
The First Transforming Illness
Matisse’s first transforming illness happened when he was a twenty-year-old law clerk. The chronic intestinal problems that had plagued him since childhood flared into an acute attack.44 Whether it was appendicitis, ulcerative colitis, or a hernia, we will probably never know, but at that time the conditions were inoperable and rest was the only alternative.45 A man in the next hospital bed recommended that Matisse try his hand at chromos to pass the time. Chromos were an early type of painting by numbers, and although his father disapproved, his artistic mother bought him two small chromos and a box of paints. “The moment I had this box of colors in my hands,” revealed Matisse, “I had the feeling that my life was there.”46
Before then, nothing had interested him, but from that moment on he thought only of painting. On returning to the law office, he would get up at dawn each morning to go to art class before work. Then, after a quick lunch, he would paint at midday, and again after six o’clock in the evening. Finally summoning his courage, Matisse begged his parents for permission to study art in Paris. In her biography of the artist, Hilary Spurling notes that at this point in his life Matisse was seen as a double failure. First, as a sickly child, he was deemed unfit to take over his father’s successful grain and hardware business, so his younger brother August was chosen instead. Now he had failed again by not wanting to be a lawyer. His father was furious, but his mother interceded, and Matisse was allowed to go. As the train pulled out of the station, his father stood there, waving his fists and shouting, “You’ll starve!”47
The Second Transforming Illness
The surgeon Philip Sandblom finds that Matisse’s second transforming illness came when the artist was in his late forties.48 Matisse was living in the windy town of l’Estaque. “I had caught bronchitis there,” he recalled, “and I came to Nice to cure it.”49 Nice is known for its excellent weather, but it rained for a month after Matisse arrived and finally he decided to leave. The very next day the sun came out and it was so beautiful that he said, “I decided not to leave Nice, and have stayed there practically for the rest of my life.”50 Sandblom notes that moving changed Matisse’s work, and “a very personal resplendent coloring was brought forth.”51 The bright sun in Nice enhanced the palette of one of the greatest colorists in the history of art.
The Third Transforming Illness
Matisse’s third transforming illness, intestinal cancer, came at the age of seventy. After an operation to remove the cancerous blockage, he had two pulmonary embolisms, the flu, and a prolapsed stomach, and remained an invalid for the rest of his life. Only able to stand for brief periods of time but unwilling to stop working, Matisse began to make art from his bed and from his wheelchair. While lying in bed he started to draw on the walls. Then he attached a piece of charcoal to a long bamboo fishing pole so he could draw on the ceiling. But these were black-and-white images and Matisse wanted to work in color.
Sitting in his wheelchair with scissors in hand, he began to cut brightly colored pieces of paper into a variety of shapes and sizes. “I call this drawing with scissors,”52 explained Matisse, who directed his assistants to place the shapes on large sheets of white paper, or on canvases, or sometimes even on the wall. His home became full of colorful forms that soared and danced from room to room. By creating art that moved for him, Matisse compensated for his lack of mobility. With these brightly colored pieces of paper, a part of Matisse was no longer sitting in his wheelchair or lying on his bed. Through artistic projection, he was up leaping and swirling with the dancing paper forms. These cutouts are among the best works of art he ever produced.
The Fourth Transforming Illness
Matisse’s fourth transforming illness happened soon after the intestinal surgery. According to Sandblom, the artist developed gallstones, and for over a year suffered from jaundice, fever, and severe pain.53 Both stoic and stubborn, Matisse remembered his last operation and chose continued pain over the danger of surgical complications. And he kept on working. He was doing linoleum-cut illustrations for a book, and they took him “ten months of effort,” said Matisse, “working all day and often at night.”54 Sandblom notes that in only one of these illustrations, Increasing Anguish, do we see the artist’s suffering. A curving white outline shows the profile of a person in distress. With its mouth wide open and its head thrown back, the figure cries out for an artist who silently sublimates his pain into work. Of all the book illustrations, this one is the best known.
The Fifth Transforming Illness
In 1942 Matisse had his fifth transforming illness. During the years after the operation his condition was sometimes stable while at other times it was poor. In an article for the New York Times, Alan Riding describes a new creative effort that began when the artist was so sick that he needed a night nurse. Monique Bourgeois, a young woman who lived nearby and was planning to be a nun, answered the request to work for him. Five years later, as Sister Jacques-Marie in the Dominican order, she had an idea that a chapel should be built in Vence, a town in the south of France, and asked Matisse to be the designer.
Matisse worked for four years on this project, called the Chapel of the Rosary. A small, exquisite structure, it is only twenty feet wide by fifty-nine feet long and sixteen feet high. He designed its stained-glass windows, a mural for the Stations of the Cross, the altar, the priest’s vestments, and also planned the architecture with the help of one of the Dominican monks, Brother Raysiguier. The artist remarked that he had always lived a very secular life, but now near its end came a project for the divine. Matisse was eighty-one years old when the chapel was complete, and he said, “I consider it to be my masterpiece.”55 Illness and Determination
When the doctors gave up on him after the cancer operation, Matisse never gave up on himself—and he lived another thirteen and a half years. “Whether you can or not, you hold on,” the artist said, and “when you’re out of will power you call on stubbornness.”56 He was also grateful to be alive. “The time you live from now on is a gift from life itself—each year, each month, each day.” 57
Matisse felt that art was healing. When his friends were sick, he would have his work hung around their beds, convinced the vibrant colors would help them get well. He insisted that we should create both from our strengths and from our weakness because what we think is our weakness is often our greatest strength. “Only what I created after the illness,” revealed Matisse, “constitutes my real self.”58
Changing a Time of Sickness into a Transforming Illness
For Matisse and for us, poor health may hold the key to insight and evolution. When that happens, we transform. The next chapter explains how to unlock a difficult situation and turn a time of sickness into a transforming illness.
Product details
- ASIN : B01EUL14MW
- Publisher : Tobi Zausner, PhD, LCSW; 1st edition (April 26, 2016)
- Publication date : April 26, 2016
- Language : English
- File size : 1589 KB
- Text-to-Speech : Enabled
- Screen Reader : Supported
- Enhanced typesetting : Enabled
- X-Ray : Not Enabled
- Word Wise : Enabled
- Sticky notes : On Kindle Scribe
- Print length : 433 pages
- Best Sellers Rank: #1,432,584 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- #485 in Psychology of Creativity & Genius
- #1,464 in Popular Psychology Creativity & Genius
- #1,951 in Creativity Self-Help
- Customer Reviews:
About the author
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Tobi Zausner, PhD, LCSW, is a research psychologist, a Fellow of the American Psychological Association, a clinician in private practice, and a visual artist with works in major museums and private collections. Dr. Zausner, who investigates consciousness, nonlinear dynamics, cognitive neuroscience, and creativity, is on the Advisory Board for the Journal of Consciousness Exploration & Research and an officer on the Board of A.C.T.S (Arts, Crafts, and Theater Safety), a nonprofit organization investigating health hazards in the arts. Dr. Zausner has taught at the C. G. Jung Foundation for Analytical Psychology, Saybrook University, Long Island University, and The New School. Her 2016 book, When Walls Become Doorways: Creativity and the Transforming Illness, examines the positive influence of physical illness on the creativity of visual artists. Her 2022 book, The Creative Trance; Altered States of Consciousness and the Creative Process, published by Cambridge University Press, explores the creative process across domains, demonstrating that it contains multiple types of altered states of consciousness.
Customer reviews
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14 global ratings
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Reviewed in the United States on October 19, 2021
I originally got this book for a dear friend who was diagnosed with stage 4 ovarian cancer. She has gone through so much: chemo and surgery. She is now going through more chemo and has been told she may also need radiation as well. She is normally creative and I was hoping this book would help her to expand on her talents. I wanted to read it before giving it to her; I didn't want one of those books, well meaning, that pretty much blames the patient for the illness. Far from it, MS Zausner, recovering from her own transforming illness, presents a comprehensive history of artists through the centuries into the present who have overcome horrendous adversity to become some of humanity's greatest assets! This wonderful manuscript also helped me to change my own attitude about my own disabilities (a much smaller scale than the examples given)! This is a must-read for anyone who has ever doubted their own abilities!
Reviewed in the United States on February 7, 2007
This book is inspiring and, also, well-researched. Dr. Zausner is both an artist herself, and an art-historian/psychologist. Here are stories and vignettes about artists, both well-known, and not so well-known, for whom illness has brought unsuspected gifts and opportunities. This occured for them in part through good fortune but also by their ability to seize and transform a situation or a life. What makes this possible? Here is the challenge. We can learn from these accounts ourselves as we face our own life trials. Many categories of illness and disability are covered. I just gave this book as a gift to a friend with her own serious illness, to give her new hope. It adds to the power of this book that Dr. Zausner, herself, has had transforming illnesses, and she shares these as well with the reader.
Reviewed in the United States on February 12, 2007
This remarkable book by Tobi Zausner, artist and psychologist, is principally a compendium of people whose lives have been transformed by illness or injury, from one of adversity to one of productivity and fulfillment through art. It includes psychological insight and some autobiographical elements. Besides introducing us to some remarkable people, and stimulating our empathy for them, it tantalizes the reader to explore their art (Googling makes it easy. Visits to real museums and exhibits are, of course, more rewarding). For those of us who may not be as creative as her artists, is may give us the courage to become more creative and fulfilled. Thank you, Tobi. You've created a book that, like your art, is truly great.
Reviewed in the United States on September 15, 2013
Readers will be amazed at the number of life-altering maladies that have plagued great artists and precluded their participation in the occupations set out for them. The author provides fascinating accounts of the lives of these artists and documents how they overcame serious handicaps to make significant contributions to society as artists. This book will convince you that "art heals."
Reviewed in the United States on December 11, 2012
I'm an artist who had to change the medium I worked in due to illness. I had to leave a medium that I loved and received recognition in. This book gave me hope that I would find my way with a new medium. Tobi Zausner made a dark time much less bleak. She had my gratitude.
Reviewed in the United States on October 5, 2009
This book felt like a group of badly written stories all put together by someone with too much time on their hands.
It offers no inspiration or real conclusions about creativity and transforming illness, its just a bunch of facts about one artist or another who also happened to be ill, it draws no connections or facts about creativity and illness. I passed this one on to the second hand shop.
There are many good Art Therapy books on this topic written by people who actually know something about this topic.
It offers no inspiration or real conclusions about creativity and transforming illness, its just a bunch of facts about one artist or another who also happened to be ill, it draws no connections or facts about creativity and illness. I passed this one on to the second hand shop.
There are many good Art Therapy books on this topic written by people who actually know something about this topic.
Reviewed in the United States on February 13, 2007
Of course, I had to flip right over to the chapter about Vincent van Gogh - having attended one of Dr. Zausner's lectures on the subject, which is so fascinating to me! Vincent seems to always be THE ARTIST we run to when we think of overcoming terrible odds and "combating [his] sickness with creativity."
Tobi's empathy for these suffering artists is evident on every page, for this book is a very personal elucidation, which absolutely goes hand-in-hand with her own masterfully transcendent paintings. It's easy to feel her deep and soulful compassion with every word and brushstroke.
You'll be so inspired with each anecdote, and all the carefully researched data, and understand the creative process more profoundly than ever... and all at once you'll discover she offers not only the problems but the solutions. Artists, by nature, CREATE - they making something out of nothing. But herein Tobi teaches you how the depth of the human spirit truly glows in the countless examples she has found to flesh out her thesis.
Her cover of Vincent's 'Wheatfield and Cypress Trees' is so appropriate for this wonderful book because it is filled with all the juxtapositions of serenity and conflict, harmony and pain... I can't wait to read her next book!
Tobi's empathy for these suffering artists is evident on every page, for this book is a very personal elucidation, which absolutely goes hand-in-hand with her own masterfully transcendent paintings. It's easy to feel her deep and soulful compassion with every word and brushstroke.
You'll be so inspired with each anecdote, and all the carefully researched data, and understand the creative process more profoundly than ever... and all at once you'll discover she offers not only the problems but the solutions. Artists, by nature, CREATE - they making something out of nothing. But herein Tobi teaches you how the depth of the human spirit truly glows in the countless examples she has found to flesh out her thesis.
Her cover of Vincent's 'Wheatfield and Cypress Trees' is so appropriate for this wonderful book because it is filled with all the juxtapositions of serenity and conflict, harmony and pain... I can't wait to read her next book!
Reviewed in the United States on October 9, 2007
Whole Person Healthcare [Three Volumes
]
In a society that values physical perfection and youth, people with illnesses have psychological as well as physical challenges. Tobi Zausner, whose background is both in art and psychology, has showed us how to use illness as a source of inspiration and creativity by reviewing the lives of both historical and contemporary artists. For healthcare professionals working in medical settings, for students learning about the meaning of illness, and for the lay person who has an illness, this beautiful new book is a must!
In a society that values physical perfection and youth, people with illnesses have psychological as well as physical challenges. Tobi Zausner, whose background is both in art and psychology, has showed us how to use illness as a source of inspiration and creativity by reviewing the lives of both historical and contemporary artists. For healthcare professionals working in medical settings, for students learning about the meaning of illness, and for the lay person who has an illness, this beautiful new book is a must!
