Don’t think that to be a true artist you have to turn into a shooting star like Van Gogh, Kurt Cobain, Marilyn Monroe or Amy Winehouse. Actress Aanya Ni Laare offers to look at people of art from the other side.
There is a stereotype that the only way to create a work of art is through suffering. This is the way of life of real artists, so we were taught. The artist is a black hole of despair, he fishes out grains of art from self-destruction, passion and self-forgetfulness.
This idea is exciting. Thousands of books have been written about Van Gogh’s ear, the death of Marilyn Monroe, or Billie Holiday’s heroin addiction. Teenagers wear T-shirts with images of Kurt Cobain, Jim Morrison and Amy Winehouse, members of the famous «27 Club» — the age at which each of them died. Like most myths, this tale is easy to sell. But remember that this is a myth.
How dare I think that I have anything to say?
How can I write, act or dance brilliantly if I grew up in a good home with loving parents and the beginning of my life was relatively comfortable? Do I have the right to create art? Or are all my attempts doomed to be banal and lifeless?
According to the myth, I have no depths to explore, no spiritual wound to dig open for inspiration, not even childhood trauma. How dare I think that I have anything to say? If I was advised to find my own style, what pattern would I follow?
I can move: maybe to the forest, to a squat or an abandoned house. Start smoking, drinking, and using drugs—or both—to truly expand your creative understanding of existence. Connect with people who get on my nerves, but keep doing it for the sake of stories and drama that I will refer to in the pages of books.
These are the stories of the greats that are fed to us. A life in which there is nothing but misfortune and pain. But what happened in between? What about the life they led in reality?
People rarely remember an important detail in the daily life of an artist, dancer or writer. About such a banal fear of a blank page, daily exercises, the first line of a work that you are going to read aloud. About the small but daunting steps you need to take to start creating and then present your work to the world.
In each of these little events there is a strange, quiet joy that makes you sit for hours trying to find the right word, reciting lines over and over again until something clicks in your head and the only possible solution appears. On some days it comes easily, on others it doesn’t come at all — that’s when the famous suffering creeps in. But it’s not that that makes you an artist, it’s the decision to keep searching no matter what.
The concept of «artist workaholic» is not as seductive, but more achievable than «artist is a genius madman». Yes, the idea of an artist as an artisan looks boring, without a twinkle. But creating works of art is incredibly tiring.
We work around the clock, but we deny it: we claim that we never prepared for the role, we didn’t study the topic for months, we didn’t redraw the picture 15 times a night. It is these hours of invisible work that are the bricks that make up a work of art and a reward for it. Let’s rethink our ideal. The artist is a researcher and a worker, and not just a semi-madman inspired by the gods.