The Important Relationship Between Creativity and Mental Health

In an attempt to encourage talking about Mental Health, creativity is being used as it always has done, as an outlook to express feelings, coming from those who are directly suffering from Mental Health Issues. With so many different techniques available: painting, drawing and writing, we are not short of ways of doing it. Whether being creative intends to raise awareness or is merely just used as an express of relief, it’s important to realise how much creativity is playing a part in making those who may sometimes feel so at lost with themselves, more in control.

I came across Ruby Elliot on World Mental Health Day in an interview with Rethink Mental Health. Elliot is an example where drawing has helped her express how she is feeling and has made for an easier way of demonstrating to people how she was struggling instead of verbally coming out with it. These days we struggle enough to verbally socialise due to technology, but now more than ever we need to be verbal, however, sometimes this isn’t possible due to feeling uncomfortable, so instead we can use alternative ways as Ruby Elliot shows: ” It can be hard enough trying to understand and convince yourself that what you’re going through is real and valid, let alone tell someone else.” Elliot focuses on drawing cartoons as her way of portraying her feelings, although they can be seen as funny, there’s a darker meaning hidden behind the laughter.

You can now get Elliot’s comic book It’s All Absolutely Fine: Life is complicated, so I’ve drawn it instead  on Amazon.

In a different outlook, Panteha Abareshi started creating illustrations when her Mental Health took a decline to look at the complexity of issues in society that can trigger depression and anxiety, rather than inherently her own feelings of Mental Health. Yet again it’s used as a form of expression that helps to translate her nightmares of being a young woman into visual realities for those on the outside. Her work may be dark but it doesn’t conceal anything, the illustrations speak for themselves meaning Abareshi doesn’t have to.

“Hurt me badly” (How do you explain craving physical pain to snuff out the chaos that comes with mental illness?)

mental illness colour swatches

Click on the image to enlarge them.

As artist’s Abareshi and Elliot are pushing the boundaries of not talking about mental health by my making it physically impossible not to see it right in front of you. For some of us it’s easy to shrug off words and change topic when you don’t fully understand what is being expressed, but with drawing and painting you can look at it ten times over just to make sure you understood. Those who talk openly about their mental illnesses should never be confined to fearing that people think they are wanting unneeded attention, instead they should be hailed for their bravery in creating pieces that help others who are less likely to express how they are feeling, as well as helping themselves get through their issues.

London has recently opened an Art Gallery of paintings done only by Mental Health patients, although the concept and idea breaks a lot of rules and can be frowned upon by others who don’t understand its objective, it ultimately aims to exclude being ashamed of mental illness. Talking to DAZED, Ben Wakeling an Art-Therapist and one of the creators of  the Outsider Gallery comments on the creative process of the pieces that can be seen in the Gallery: “They’re not calculated like other art movements, they didn’t understand what they were doing and you can’t (say), “I really want to put the work into an exhibition” because they’ll just be talking at you about King Charles and being his best friend. They’re in their own story and it’s constant. And some of those outcomes, whether it’s music or art-related, visual marks, are so beautiful and I really wanted to start framing the work, hanging it up and telling my mates. The more I got involved in the arts, the more distant I became from art movements. I didn’t realise at the time but there isn’t a mental health gallery in London or a dedicated space for mental health.” take a look at the whole interview on DAZED to see their exclusive view of mental health therapy.

Outsider Gallery

In addition, a mental health magazine named ANXY, hopes to be released in 2017 with the aim of promoting personal narratives through the use of illustrations and photography. “The biggest takeaway that we want readers to have is this sense of connection,” Rojas said, ANXY’s founder and creator, talking to Huffington Post: “This can be a shared experience, but the main challenge is that people rarely talk about it. The magazine will hopefully give those with mental health issues a greater feeling of community.” The magazine will give a different way of reading about Mental Health in comparison to scientific magazines, who may discuss the subject, but using a creative magazine will hopefully make the subject more readable and visual for the readers, therefore, more understandable.

The importance of all these outlets is that they encourage others to seek the help if they need it, through showing that mental health is everywhere, and it affects everyone in one way or another, be that directly or indirectly. As well, even more importantly they create platforms in which people who don’t quite understand Mental Health can learn and better educate themselves to become more comfortable in talking about it.

 

 

How Art restricted my self-confidence but also presented me with it

Back in the years of taking my GCSEs, I took part in the Duke Of Edinburgh Bronze Award (not sure I even got the certificate in the end). Required to do a certain amount of hours on a skill of our choice, I chose to take the skills of sewing my Nan had tried to teach me for years that one step further. Optimistically and passionately I decided to take on the challenge of creating a dress that would be specifically designed for women of a similar shape to me – think the pears; Beyonce, JLo, Alicia Keys (although, I’d be flattering myself comparing me to them). For most of us, school highlights our biggest flaws, it’s a time of peer pressure and dissatisfaction of not looking a particular way. But, in all honesty, I’ve always been relatively comfortable with my body, still, I’d be lying if I didn’t say I never wished I was taller or slimmer. When it came to beginning my project I was stuck in the same old rut of drawing figures that represented standardised fashion proportions instead of reflecting how I or these other women like me were truly shaped. For me, the designs didn’t look flattering or didn’t look enticing without the figures and their tremendously long legs or prominent cheekbones. It wasn’t until I went to a water-colouring class that I realised the unrealistic bodies I was creating. An older lady approached me to ask what I was doing, after explaining she politely said “why do you make them so thin? Why don’t you draw them like us? we’re the ones buying them.” She was right but, it was my own insecurities and what I dreamed of being that restricted me from creating a piece that complimented who I was. I was trying so hard to create a piece of clothing that celebrated a woman’s real body shape whilst at the same time acting ashamed of it. In reality, this is how the fashion world portrays their designs but I had the opportunity to use my art to change it.

Having wanted to be a fashion illustrator for so long Nuno Dacosta and Sabine Pieper represent a few favourites of mine along with Megan Hess who does pieces for Dior, Prada and Vanity Fair. Their works are produced by solid lines and seem effortlessly perfect, something I hope one day mine will be too. However, as are with things that are so perfect they are almost always far-fetched from reality, yet even now this is what I inspire my drawings to be like. So when it came to taking a life drawing class for the first time at the University I didn’t know how to begin – In awareness of mental health issues, the University were aiming to promote body positivity – I didn’t know how to sketch so freely like everybody else around me. It normally takes me hours to get one side of a face how I want it, let alone be given 3-5 mins to sketch a whole person. This was all down to wanting perfection. I wanted perfect lines of the body to reflect the skills of me as an artist but, I was missing the point, I was trying to draw things that weren’t there. I was trying to alter parts of the people I was seeing because I couldn’t do with the varied proportions on my page, ones that didn’t coincide with what fashion drawing had taught me. Yet as I looked on and a new pose began I started to understand the freedom of sketching without setting restrictions. As I drew the curves of the woman in front of me I realised the beauty of all our bodies. I looked upon her with admiration, aware that what I was producing on a page from looking at a real life woman in front of me was just as gorgeous as the rule-drawn ones in my fashion sketch books. How people held their bodies, how their bodies curved and didn’t curved became so attractive, and one particular artist who represents this same admiration for people just as much as me is Austrian born artist Egon Schiele.

Born in 1890 Schiele only lived to the young age of 28, yet he managed to produce a varied collection of spectacular pieces in his too-short life span. There is not one piece of his work that ceases to fascinate me. That doesn’t draw me to the details of our bodies which we usually criticise. Instead, for me, Schiele’s figurative drawings amplify the beauty of the lines of our bodies, that demonstrate the diversity of our anatomy (Astrid points out a similar point in FEATURE: The Media’s damaging impact on 21st-Century beauty). For years I have been fixated on the steady one-drawn lines used in illustration, the flawlessness and the ideal. Schiele throws all this out the window, he not only strips down his subjects but, with limited mediums he can give more depth to a piece of work than any artist I know. It’s a personal opinion that his pieces strike something inside. When I saw his collection at the Leopold Museum in Vienna, the home of the young artist, it displayed a mixture of emotions. Many of the more detailed paintings looked unhappy and disfigured yet some although, their bodies demonstrated vulnerability at the same time illustrated confidence in a sexual and living nature. His works may not be as exposeing to us now as they were back in the 1920s, however, they still possess a confrontation of body image and sexuality that people are yet unable to face. We shy away from seeing our bodies as they really are, even without media influencing people to find a way to bring themselves down. The variations throughout his collections are unarguable, including his own self-portraits: with his famous-long hands, Shiele depicts himself in so many ways, using himself as a forefront of differences in association with our bodies. Life drawing has taught me the acceptance of loving who we are. Of course, I know there’ll still be days where I dislike how I look but I also believe that the bodies we have as humans, whether we are tall, short, curvy, slim, is the most beautiful thing in the world.

By Founder Lauren Victioria Edwards