
Loneliness and Creativity
Go Hand-in-hand
“If you are alone you belong entirely to yourself.” — Da Vinci
Loneliness. Such a painful word. Us artists don’t want to talk about it but it’s there. Creeping up on us on the background of our life’s canvas. And the most agonizing loneliness is not in solitude, but when we’re amongst others. We suffer. Alone. Fighting something alone. There’s a silence. Not a physical silence. It’s an inner loneliness. Some days, the silence gets so overwhelming that we’re afraid of seeing what’s at the bottom of our ocean. Virginia Woolf articulated this intimate relationship with loneliness as an artist most beautifully in her artist journals.
But on the other side of this loneliness is this incredible explosion of emotions. When it overwhelms, I implode. If I never felt these extraordinary feelings of stress, anxieties and fears stemming from my loneliness, I would lose myself in acquiescence of this world that I wear a mask in to survive. Instead, as an artist — I choose to embrace this loneliness as a conduit, a gateway to the art that I paint. Adrienne Rich once asserted that “the impulse to create begins, often terribly and fearfully, in a tunnel of silence.” And perhaps this is my gift. This perhaps is what distinguishes me from other people. It is out of the restlessness, the scattered emotional mess that loneliness ignites that most of my art is born.
We are a city…a world…a universe in ourselves. And when we embrace our loneliness as a call into our true selves, we create. God, do we create!
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