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.

For many artists, it is clear that isolation provides an increased awareness of one’s surroundings, refocusing attention towards details which would not normally be noticed or appreciated. The lack of stimulation drives one to find new ways to be creative, rethinking our own situation and environment. This was certainly the case with Vincent Van Gogh.

Isolation alone may not be enough, however. To be truly creative, one may have to be lonely. The Frenchborn author Anaïs Nin wrote, ‘Great art was born of great terrors, great loneliness, great inhibitions, instabilities, and it always balances them’. This further supports the idea that it is necessary to feel rejected from society in order to produce artistic masterpieces. Some psychologists have suggested that solitude alone is not enough to fuel creative genius because no rejection has taken place and it is this dismissal that makes someone determined and allows them to push themselves as far as they can with only themselves to rely on. As the famous philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche suggested, ‘Loneliness is one thing, solitude another’.

However, the circumstances of the isolation are extremely important. If one was locked in a solitary prison cell, could one really create something ‘successful’, relying solely on one’s mind for inspiration? Surely blocking out others’ opinions and perspectives may result in a singular viewpoint, meaning the possibilities of what we can create become limited or lacking in some way. This is especially important in art, as artists are continually looking to their surroundings and other artists’ work for inspiration – so being isolated could slow down this creative flow of ideas in one’s mind.

Also, humans are social creatures, and ultimately isolation can often be thought to have a negative impact on our well-being – Van Gogh shot himself in the chest with a revolver at only 37 years old – and hence our creativity. Like so many talented people across all creative disciplines, there has often been a propensity for artists to experience drugs and alcohol as a means to escape loneliness, and see the world from a new perspective, in order to enhance their abilities. But this is often a false hope that results in further isolation and trauma.

Both Frida Kahlo and Vincent Van Gogh clearly demonstrate how self-isolation can help artists focus their inspiration and creativity, resulting in art works of exceptional quality, which are perceived to be immensely successful. However, Kahlo channelled her unfortunate situation and loneliness into a kind of freedom or release. With Van Gogh and his apparent despair, it seems that his isolation (be it mental or physical), resulted in an imprisoning experience, from which suicide was his only escape. But the troubled and lonely genius continues to be a familiar character. As Aldous Huxley wrote, ‘If one’s different, one’s bound to be lonely,’ and if you think about it briefly, it is evident that many of history’s creative geniuses have been and will continue to be, deeply lonely people.