Why? That's my Question. Why Make Art?

I just finished a book called Art and Fear that discusses the questions of why many talented artists in a variety of fields stop making art.  I have a related but different question:  Why do people who have every reason to give up, keep on making art?

Makers of Art give up when their self doubts grow to the point where they just see no point in perpetuating their creative ruse.  Makers of Art give up when their family and/or their audience rejects their work with vitriolic vigor.  I understand why such makers of creative stuff might stop when something important is mocked to the point that their heart feels like it is torn and bleeding.  What I don’t get are people who create anyway.   

There are artists like Vincent Van Gogh.  

Mr. Van Gogh desired fame and fortune, and he had rejection from his family, and the buying public, nevertheless, he continued to make art.  I’ve read that he made around nine hundred works of art but only sold one during his lifetime.  What sustained Van Gogh to keep working with so little positive feedback?

But I’m not just wondering about people who stand up against the world’s rejection, I’m thinking about people who reject recognition.  There are two artists that come to mind immediately.  The first is David Pearson, a British artist. 

 He taught art, retired, and then kept to himself.  When people stopped by to talk he always seemed in a hurry to get back to something.  After his death more than 20,000 pieces of art, from huge canvasses to tiny sculptures, were found at his home. 

The whole time he was making art, he was NOT trying to sell his art, or show his art, he was drive to do one thing only, and that was making his art.  One student said that they students where Mr. Pearson was teaching art had no idea he was creating a large body of art.  He helped them but he didn't share his interests. 

The second artist I think of is Bernard Gilardi, a Wisconsin artist. 

The one thing that was clear to everyone who knew him, was that Mr. Gilardi did not care about scoring big.  Apparently the thing Mr. Gilardi cared about was painting. He cared about creating surreal and wonderfully comedic worlds of his own making, which he did in solitude for more than 40 years. He spent many evenings and weekends in the basement of his small, near north side Milwaukee home where the walls were painted peach and the space was his own.  He had a job, and a family, and he did what life called on him to do, but as frequently as his life allowed, he went to his basement studio and painted.  During his life Mr. Gilardi managed to make nearly 400 paintings. 

One story I read said that it was after his funeral, when family and friends were in the home, that someone mentioned that Mr. Gilardi painted and that there were pictures down in the basement.  That sounds like there were few if any examples of his work hanging on the walls of his home.

Or consider a folk artist from India named, Nek Chand. 

Chand was born in 1924 in a small village in Punjab, India. He worked as a farmer in his community until the 1947 partition of Pakistan and India, when Chand's Hindu family was forced to leave their belongings and relocate. After the move, Chand separated from his family and in 1954, he married and became a road inspector. Chand's duties put him in close proximity to the ruins and rubble of a quickly changing India. In 1958 Chand began collecting stones, he found on the job as a road inspector.  Chand started bringing these stones home one by one because his mod of transportation was a bicycle.  Chand selected a  hidden locale he transformed into a magical space; his own private kingdom. For seven years Chand used rocks to build a secret world, along with materials gathered from abandoned hospitals and businesses. He formed statue after statue of his partially humanoid forms and their beautifully lopsided features. The 18-acre-site, which is now public, is a spiritual garden of recycled materials and childhood dreams. There are now 3,000 sculptures dispersed throughout the rock garden, not including the many rocks which, when admired carefully, contort to resemble the human face. 

And consider Emily Dickinson.

   

Ms Dickinson was a poet who wrote throughout her life, but never achieved even local recognition of her work.  Over the years she carefully copied her poems on pages that she then sewed together with string or ribbon forming little books referred to today as fascicles.  What kept her writing when she had few if any readers? 

This is one of my burning questions:  Why?  Did these creative people not want an audience?  Of course they did.  Not only did they want an audience, they each expected to have an audience.  Emily Dickinson carefully arranged her poems into booklets and left them to be discovered in her desk.  I have read that she asked her sister to burn her papers, but when you find a stack of handmade books you know they don’t want those books destroyed.

If an artist paints a picture and the one and only value they have is the act of painting, and if they have absolutely NO interest in having their finished work admired by others, then they would destroy the work as soon as it was done.  You don’t stack up 2000 paintings in your tiny house and not expect someone to find them after you die.

In my own case I seem to have an aversion to self promotion.  I go to a coffee house sometimes that has local artists hang their work and offer it for see and the fee for this is zero.  I have been asked several times to allowing my work to show there.  I am not against people seeing my work.  I am not against selling my work.  But for some reason I can’t make myself show my work there.  Perhaps I’m just too lazy to do the work of framing, and transporting, and hanging my work.  Perhaps I am so afraid of rejection and criticism that I want to be dead before anyone sees it, so that if viewers confirm my self-doubt that it will hurt less due to my being dead.

Something motivates us to make art.  In ancient times, when there was no way to make money from art, artists still made arrowheads fancier than arrowheads needed to be, and although it was dark and a long ways in the dark, and the work had to be done by the light of a torch, cave paintings were created and no one got paid, no one got famous, and I wonder why did those people make art?