Why create? The artist and art

One of the reasons I work as an arts consultant is that I am fascinated by why artists become artists and what it is audiences get from art. In my next few blogs I will be examining different aspects of this. And I start now with a look at what motivates artists to create from a psychological perspective.

Freudian thinkers position loss – what we have to give up of ourselves in order to engage in social relations and live ‘well’ in the world, and our mourning of this – at the core of the human condition. The therapeutic process in psychoanalysis attempts to find ways to cope with this loss. And we can view the creative process as having the same core motivation: trying to make sense of lived experience.

Psychoanalysis also recognises that human beings are loathe to change (Lacan); we prefer the comfort of the known, however both therapeutic and creative processes demand change. Furthermore, at a neurological level, artists are seen to suffer a sense of loss with the completion of an artwork. This leads to an often uncomfortable ambivalent state in the artist’s craft – the emotional burden and pain of confronting their own issues, matched with an inherent need to express, alongside the friction of being of, separate to, and dependent on the world they inhabit.

So why do they do it? Why be involved in something so potentially traumatic?

Could it be that this conflict – this crisis of satisfaction – is a motivation in itself? Could it be that, when the artist’s default solution to the lived experience is no longer working intrapsyhically, they become motivated to explore it in creative practice, and so the creative process itself becomes a reparative one? Thus art is a process that shapes identity; placed in the context of the artist’s life it is life affirming. And that is where its satisfaction comes from.

W. Abell developed a ‘psychographic’ plain to explain the artist’s personal psychic motive to create. This comprised of internal psychology as well as social context and included a motivation to create to stave off neurosis.

But we need to be mindful – practice can become its own ‘solution’ and artists can get stuck on one emotional plain in a ‘repetition compulsion’; is this the artist returning to common themes, motifs, symbols in their work? If so, can we question whether it is possible for artists to ever create anew without a complete satisfaction of loss?

For us, as a working sector, I also pose the question of how can this knowledge and any debate stemming from it help us work with artists better? Does this explanation of creativity resonate with you and is it relevant to contemporary practice? Does this differ across art forms? Is loss indeed the starting point?

In my next blog I will look at the place of the audience in the creative process, asking what it is they ‘get’ from experiencing art.