In Time of Lockdown: Reflections on Locks, Lockdown, Isolation

Is an Element of Self-Isolation Necessary for an Artist to be Successful?

Nina Blakey (MO Re) What makes an artist successful? History is threaded with artists that we would recognise as accomplished – their artwork ranging across all genres and media. However, does their time spent within society affect their productivity or quality? The first thing to define is ‘success’; some artists may consider this to be the amount of income and recognition received (this may not have necessarily been within the artist’s lifetime). Others may perceive success as a more personal fulfilment, using their art as a gateway to achieving emotional satisfaction in life. Through the lives of Frida Kahlo and Vincent Van Gogh, two of the most esteemed artists who isolated themselves for a significant time during their lives, I will explore the effects of this experience on their success.

Frida Kahlo had a life laced with pain and suffering. She was left crippled from polio as a child and was caught in a near-fatal bus crash at the age of 18. This led to a life of surgeries and recoveries, resulting in many months’ isolated in a hospital bed. However, some may perceive this incident as fate, as it opened the door to a new-found outlook on life and solitude which was the principal inspiration of many of her greatest artworks. A series of abortions and miscarriages in her 20s left her traumatised, but also inspired most of her self-portraits, as she is usually accompanied by animals in these paintings – a famous example being Self-Portrait with Thorn Necklace and Hummingbird, in which she is presented as having a cat and a monkey on her shoulders, to replace the children that she was not able to have. All of this stress in her life was not helped by an often-tempestuous relationship with her husband, Diego Rivera, as well as strained relations with her mother.

Throughout many of Frida Kahlo’s most emotive paintings, she is depicted in desolate and void landscapes – a direct reflection of her time in isolation after the bus accident as a teenager. The period she spent trapped in bed gave her time to reflect on her existence and life in general, and one can see through her artwork the thoughts and emotions that it evoked. Her paintings are very open and honest as they reflect her emotions and the events in her life – whether good or bad. She reflected: ‘I am not sick. I am broken. But I am happy as long as I can paint’.

For Frida, art was a way to release her inner feelings, a form of reassurance in her darkest times. ‘I paint myself,’ she once said, ‘because I am so often alone, because I am the person I know best’. Of her 143 surviving paintings, 55 are self-portraits. Though she was a notably social person when she had the opportunity to be, isolation not only motivated her, but directly inspired some of her greatest and most successful artwork.

Similarly, Vincent Van Gogh likely had a wide range of mental issues, none of which was suitably diagnosed while he was alive; with his loneliness weighing heaviest on him. In 1889, after mutilating his ear, he moved to the asylum of Saint-Paul-de-Mausole in 1889, where he stayed for 53 weeks. There, he had little contact with everyday life and none with the art world. He wrote to his sister, Wil, that this isolation was necessary ‘if we want to work’, even though it cut him off from his innovative circle in Paris, which had been a crucial source of inspiration at a key moment in his artistic development. Nevertheless, at the asylum he was able to put all of his energy into his work, with few other distractions; he was able to study nature closely and found this to be a releasing activity – it was here that he produced my own personal favourite, The Starry Night. Van Gogh recognised that loneliness is not just sufficient for creativity; it is necessary. It is almost as if he could only be truly creative when detached from society. And he sacrificed his own well-being for the importance of his art.

He wrote a series of letters during his lifetime to his brother Theo which reveal his emotions and feelings at different stages of his life. Having left the asylum in 1890, Van Gogh moved to the sleepy town of Auvers-sur-Oise in north-eastern France. He wrote to his brother about his isolation, saying that even if he were to have a friend for whom he cared, he felt that it would only serve to distract him from his art. Consequently, he felt he had two options: either to content himself with loneliness or to try to counteract his loneliness with friendships, thereby disrupting his creativity. Moving to this village would be ‘the starting point for one of the saddest episodes in a life already rife with sad events’, according to Jan Hulsker, a Dutch art historian who studied Van Gogh’s life in great depth. However, during this period he would produce several successful artworks: including his Portrait of Dr. Gachet, one of his most revered paintings; and Wheatfield with Crows, which is thought to be his last piece, completed early in the same month that he died.

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