Creative States of Mind

Psychoanalysis and the Artist's Process

Patricia Townsend

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780429620942
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Psychoanalysis
• Index: Psychology

What is it like to be an artist? Drawing on interviews with professional artists, this book takes the reader inside the creative process. The author, an artist and a psychotherapist, uses psychoanalytic theory to shed light on fundamental questions such as the origin of new ideas and the artist's state of mind while working.

Based on interviews with 33 professional artists, who reflect on their experiences of creating new works of art, as well as her own artistic practice, Patricia Townsend traces the trajectory of the creative process from the artist's first inkling or 'pre-sense', through to the completion of a work, and its release to the public. Drawing on psychoanalytic theory, particularly the work of Donald Winnicott, Marion Milner and Christopher Bollas, the book presents the artist's process as a series of interconnected and overlapping stages, in which there is a movement between the artist's inner world, the outer world of shared 'reality', and the spaces in-between.

Creative States of Mind: Psychoanalysis and the Artist's Process fills an important gap in the psychoanalytic theory of art by offering an account of the full trajectory of the artist's process based on the evidence of artists themselves. It will be useful to artists who want to understand more about their own processes, to psychoanalysts and psychotherapists in their clinical work, and to anyone who studies the creative process.

1
The Pre-Sense

I find in everyday experience I cannot not be seduced by something at some point … I don’t seek it out. I just experience life and it happens.

Laura Malacart

How does a new artwork come into being? Not surprisingly, the interviews with artists make it clear that there is no single answer to this question, and the issue of what constitutes the beginning of a new work is already complex. Each artist is influenced by her personal background, by her training, by previous work and by the cultural climate of her time, so that, in a sense, the artist’s journey towards each work could be said to be life-long. For the purposes of this book, I have chosen to define the beginning as the point when the artist has a first intimation of the possibility of a new work. In this chapter, I examine my own experience and that of the artists I interviewed to trace the different ways in which the earliest stirrings of a potential in the mind of the artist may develop.

Among the artists I interviewed, many described an encounter with something in the outside world as usually marking their first awareness of the beginnings of a new work. One of the interviewees, Hayley Newman, describes her experience:

Generally, it kind of starts with a ‘hunch’ … just a sense of something that is interesting that is starting to engage me. […] the ‘hunch’ is actually kind of a deliciously imaginative space. It’s like the space that … I want to go to. Or something that triggers the imagination of a possibility in myself.

(Newman 2011)

The ‘hunch’ as a ‘space’ suggests an opening up, an expansion of the mind to allow many possibilities. The ‘hunch’ marks the beginning of an imaginative exploration of something that interests the artist, and Newman’s description suggests that the interest is more than intellectual. It signals a personal engagement, and there is a sense of a process that has already begun. The ‘hunch’ is not a clear idea or image of a possible work. Such an image may or may not emerge later, but at this stage the lack of definition allows the artist space for her imagination to play unfettered by the restrictions of detail. The Oxford Online Dictionary gives the meaning of the noun ‘hunch’ as ‘a feeling or guess based on intuition rather than fact’ and lists ‘feeling’, ‘impression’, ‘inkling’, ‘presentiment’ and ‘premonition’ among its synonyms. The dictionary also lists informal synonyms as ‘gut feeling’ and ‘feeling in one’s bones’. All these terms may be relevant to the meaning that this artist gives to the word. By ‘hunch’, she is referring to a haptic experience that is felt in both body and mind.

The experience of finding something in the outside world that seems to have a special personal meaning and that promises the possibility of a new artwork was described by several of the interviewees:

I was in Pongee’s the silk merchant buying some silk dupion for one project and found in their display racks … some tulle, some very light silk tulle in the perfect colour of the Chanel pink that I use a lot. And I bought my silk dupion at vast expense, but in my mind was the silk tulle, what could I do with it.

(Kivland 2011)

I just came across a photograph that I hadn’t seen before recently of a woman on the shore near where we are … and there’s something in the photograph that … not quite sure what it is, and it’s quite, it’s not very clear, it’s quite a blurred photograph, but there’s something about it that appeals to me as a painter.

(O’Donoghue 2013)

In one sense, these two experiences are rather different from one another. Sharon Kivland sees some material that she wants to use as a medium for an artwork whereas Hughie O’Donoghue sees a photograph that may offer a new subject for a painting. But there are also factors in common. For both artists, the discovery of something in the outside world has triggered an imaginative response. It has set off an internal process that may eventually result in a new work. An important point seems to be that there is a certain vagueness or openness in the artist’s experience at this point. Kivland’s fascination with the silk tulle is related to its sensual qualities – its lightness and its pink colour – but she does not yet know where this will take her. For O’Donoghue, the indistinctness of the image is important in that the photograph does not tie itself too specifically to a particular woman. I will use the term ‘pre-sense’ to denote the initial sense of something that is of personal interest, that engages the artist’s imagination, inviting further exploration and offering the possibility of a new work. (In previous publications, such as Townsend (2015, 2017), I have used the term ‘hunch’ for this experience.) In this chapter, I explore the nature of this pre-sense, the various ways in which it may emerge and the ways in which it may be developed by the artist.

In order to explore this in more depth, I will give an account of my own experience of beginning a new series of artworks:

Some years ago I began to spend regular periods of time in the Lake District in North-West England. Much of my artwork relates to landscape and my intention was to make artworks responding to some aspect of this area. But despite, or perhaps because of, the beauty of my surroundings, I could find no subject to capture my imagination. I was staying in a valley halfway between the mountains and Morecambe Bay, a vast expanse of quicksands, channels and intertidal mudflats. After a while I noticed that I would always travel to the mountains rather than to the coastline. The mountains attracted me. They seemed to me to be comforting, solid, dependable, containing. The Bay, on the other hand, seemed too open, too flat, too vast. There was something troubling about this landscape. Was it the history of the Bay, the fact that many lives have been lost here to the quicksands or to fast incoming tides? Looking out over the great expanse of the Bay at low tide, I imagined myself walking out alone towards the horizon until I could see no land. I imagined what it might feel like to be out in this wet desert, far from help. This sense of isolation and lack of containment seemed to be one aspect of my emotional reaction to the Bay. Another had to do with the imagined experience of being sucked beneath the ground by quicksands. Or being swept away, engulfed, by the incoming tide which is said to be as fast as a galloping horse. But I felt that there was more to my feelings about the Bay than these emotionally charged images. It was as if these reactions were the tip of an iceberg and that below the surface were less conscious associations, which I could not yet access. It was this feeling that propelled me to make a series of artworks related to the Bay.¹

Something about the Bay resonated with something in me, leaving me with the sense that something significant was going on. This also seemed to offer the promise that the Bay might provide the means to find a form (in the shape of a new artwork) for this experience. There was a felt sense that here in the outer world was a perceptual form that chimed with the inner. There was not an exact fit between inner and outer, but there was the promise that some sort of fit could be found in the form of an artwork.

In retrospect, it seemed that I had been alert for some aspect or element of the landscape which would evoke a particular sort of emotional response. The mountains appealed strongly to me, but I was not drawn to make art related to them. Rather, it seems that I was, without being fully aware of it at the time, seeking something that would arouse a more ambivalent reaction. The Bay was troubling and so offered the possibility of making a work that might clarify this uneasy response. It raised my anxieties, and the possibility of creating a series of works related to it was both exciting and fearful because I knew that, in doing so, I would be stepping into unknown territory, exploring something that I did not yet understand and that might uncover painful or even terrifying emotions.

Kivland’s fascination with the silk tulle, O’Donoghue’s ‘something that appeals’, Newman’s ‘hunch’ and my own response to Morecambe Bay all signal a resonance between inner and outer worlds. It is this resonance, together with the artist’s presentiment that she will be able to create an artwork related to this sensation, that constitutes the experience that I call the ‘pre-sense’. The artist has the sense of something significant that cannot yet be apprehended clearly.

I want to think about the nature of this resonance between inner and outer by bringing in the writing of the psychoanalyst and paediatrician D.W. Winnicott on transitional objects and transitional phenomena. Winnicott observed that, as the infant begins to move towards objective perception based on reality testing, he² may adopt a teddy bear, piece of blanket or other item that assumes great significance, particularly at moments of separation or anxiety. The bear or blanket is a substitute for the missing sensory elements of the mother’s body and offers the child a form to correspond to his need. Winnicott suggests that these ‘transitional objects’, along with other ‘transitional phenomena’ (for instance, for the infant, such activities as babbling or rhythmic movements leading to sleep), belong to both inner and outer reality simultaneously. In a radical departure from earlier classical psychoanalytic theory, Winnicott postulates an intermediate area of experiencing, a potential space, between the world of shared external reality and the personal inner world (Winnicott 1953). It is a space of illusion in which objects have both an autonomous external existence and a life in the inner world of the individual. Through the concept of transitional phenomena, Winnicott links the early experiences of the infant, who creates a personal ‘transitional object’, with the play of the older child and with cultural experience in adult life. All these situations take one into ‘an area that is not challenged, because no claim is made on its behalf except that it shall exist as a resting place for the individual engaged in the perpetual human task of keeping inner and outer reality separate yet interrelated’ (ibid.: 3).

My encounter with Morecambe Bay, Kivland’s discovery of the silk tulle and O’Donoghue’s finding of the photograph can all be understood in terms of transitional phenomena. When I responded emotionally to the landscape of More-cambe Bay, I was in a state of mind in which the outer reality of the landscape affected me and, at the same time, I projected my own feelings and memories and fantasies onto the landscape. I imbued the Bay with my own personal meaning (though this meaning was not yet articulated). The boundaries between me and the landscape were partially dissolved so that I could no longer say whether my perceptions were of outer reality or of my own inner world. They were both at the same moment.

Winnicott does not discuss the artist’s activity in any detail, but he does write about his view of the origins of creativity in the earliest stages of life. He describes the situation in which the infant is searching for ‘something’, having a sense or intimation of something that will correspond to his need but not yet knowing what form this ‘something’ will take. The mother’s response, in offering her breast, provides a form that fits the infant’s intimation. According to Winnicott, if the infant imagines (or hallucinates) the breast at the moment when his mother presents it to him, the infant has the illusion that he has created the breast. Winnicott terms this experience ‘primary creativity’. This is the precursor to the stage of the transitional object. Whilst the experience of primary creativity is facilitated by the mother’s presenting herself to the infant, the infant ‘discovers’ the transitional object (an object that is ‘not me’ and also ‘not mother’) for himself. These early experiences form the basis of creative activity in adulthood where creative living is understood as endowing elements of the outside world with a personal meaning. Winnicott specifically mentions the arts as a potential area of transitional phenomena (and therefore of creative living) for the audience (Winnicott 1953: 16).

The artist’s creation of an artwork follows in a direct line from the infant’s ‘creation’ of the breast, through the use of a transitional object and the older child’s play. In all these activities, something in the outside world provides an external form for something from the inner world through a process that involves an overlap between inner and outer. In primary creativity, the mother’s response in presenting her breast to her baby at the right moment gives form to the infant’s preconception that there is something to be found that will satisfy him. The transitional object gives form to the infant’s sense of missing the mother’s physical presence. The artist too has an intimation (a pre-sense) that there is something to be found or, rather, created that will correspond with an inner experience (whether or not she eventually succeeds in creating such a form). But there is a difference between the artist’s situation and the interaction between inner and outer in the infant’s ‘creation’ of the breast or his use of the transitional object. The infant finds the breast and the transitional object ready made. No physical transformation of the external object is necessary (although there is a psychic transformation). The artist, on the other hand, must create her own form. There is a closer parallel between artist and the older child at play, as the child may build his own world, reflecting his inner landscape, through his use of toys or other materials. Of course, this is not to say that art practice is equivalent to child’s play. Art is made within a cultural context, drawing on a cultural heritage and usually with the intention of presenting the finished work to an audience.

But although Winnicott’s writing on the origins of creativity and on transitional phenomena is helpful in thinking about my experience of Morecambe Bay, it does not fully explain the state of mind that accompanies the ‘pre-sense’. The endowing of something in the outside world with personal meaning is not something peculiar to artists. As Winnicott says, it is the hallmark of creative living for everyone. But for the artist, there is something more to this experience on those occasions when it gives rise to the desire to make an artwork.

So what is this ‘something more’? The baby’s hallucination of the breast and the use of a transitional object are essentially physical, bodily experiences. The artist interviews indicate that the pre-sense also has a physical component. Henrietta Simson says of the subject of her painting:

It’s almost like kind of wanting to be closer to the thing somehow than just visually. If you can take it and recreate it as your own … it’s a closer connection somehow. It’s not just a kind of visual thing any more … grabbing it in a stronger way than just looking at it maybe.

(Simson 2011)

Simson’s experience of the ‘thing’ in the outside world is of being drawn to it in a haptic, bodily way. ‘Just looking’ implies a distance between viewer and whatever is viewed, but this artist seems to want to get inside the ‘thing’ or to have it inside her, and only through this experience can she ‘recreate it as [her] own’. In a similar vein, the photographer Susan Derges, speaking about her work River Taw, says ‘The ideas behind the project were about becoming close to the element of the river, as a metaphor of immersion and participation. I was looking to be part of it …’ (Read 2017: 116).

The psychoanalyst and artist Marion Milner seems to be exploring a similar experience when she writes about the bodily nature of her response to her subject matter. She writes about the difficulty of preserving her experience in her painting and comes to feel that she needs to ‘spiritually envelop’ her subject before starting work. She quotes a passage from a diary note:

The impulse to paint those flowers, crimson cyclamen, feels like a desire to perpetuate the momentary glimpse of timeless peace that is given by the extension of their petals in space. I want to taste it continually, swallow it, become merged with it – just like those feelings of wanting to eat a landscape, or having eaten it; as if there was an equal expense of space inside one, a sort of through-the-looking-glass land.

(Milner 1957: 57)

Milner’s experience of the flowers is visual, kinaesthetic and gustatory. Although Milner calls this ‘spiritual envelopment’, the metaphor of eating makes it clear that, for Milner, this is a very visceral experience. She wants to incorporate the flowers in order to become ‘merged’ with them, and she regards this act of taking in as a necessary step on the path to making a painting. The painting is intended to preserve the artist’s experience, putting it (or, rather, a transformed version of it) back into the outside world. For Milner herself, this act of taking in is fraught with anxiety because she does not know whether she will be able to create a satisfactory painting. If not, she may feel that ‘by having it inside one might have destroyed it’. She speculates that ‘To an established painter, who knows that he can successfully bring what he has taken inside himself back to life in the outside world as a painting, there may be less anxiety in this act of spiritual envelopment’ (Milner 1957: 63).

Milner’s description suggests that the beginning of a new work of art is heralded by the taking in of something from the outside world and she, like Derges and Simson, wishes to merge with her subject matter. Milner says of her own desire to paint: ‘I wanted to ensoul nature with what was really there, to make perception of the hidden insides and essential nature of objects fit in with what I knew, in moments of keenest awareness, to be really there’ (Milner 1957: 120). She writes of the ‘soul’ of her subject: ‘… a “soul” which was both really there, but which also was something that I had given to it from my own memory and feeling, since otherwise I would not have been able to see what was really there’ (ibid.). Milner insists that she perceives a hidden something in nature that ‘really’ exists and that it is essential to the object she wants to paint: it is its ‘soul’. But this ‘soul’ can only be perceived by Milner through her endowment of the object with elements of her own inner world. In other words, this ‘soul’ belongs not only to ‘nature’ but to herself. Milner’s use of the word ‘soul’, and her writing about wanting to ‘spiritually envelop’ her subject, are examples of her trying to find a way of describing an experience that does not easily lend itself to everyday language. At times, she seems to write of the...