I'm Just a Tortured Artist, Baby (Is That a Bad Thing?)
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 25 ก.ค. 2024
- Thank you for watching my very personal analysis of the tortured artist trope! I have returned after being away from the internet...you'll see why!
Music: That's Entertainment by Left at London | leftatlondon.bandcamp.com
Other videos about the trope:
The Art Assignment | • The Truth of the Tortu...
Shanspeare | • Your Art Isn’t Better ...
Chapters
0:00 Intro
4:46 Francis Bacon
10:20 "Sad Trans Woman Painter"
21:41 Frida Kahlo
26:12 When Your Body Is a Prison
32:16 My Life Fell Apart
38:32 I Don't Want to Be Tortured Anymore
43:51 Outro + Credits + I Have a New Game
Footage & Samples Used:
"Francis Bacon" (1985) - The South Bank Show
"Francis Bacon and The Brutality of Fact" (1987) - BBC
"Francis Bacon: A Brush with Violence" (2017) - BBC
• Jamie Lee "Trowma" Curtis
• BIP LING - BIP BURGER
• So Your Cat Wants A Ma... - บันเทิง
I just want to let folks know that it’s okay to laugh along -with- me when I make jokes about my life. I included them along with goofy edits to lighten up some dark events, so you are allowed to find them funny. However, the inclusion of jokes isn’t an invitation to be disrespectful. Thank you
My son in HS (while transitioning) used to make a lot of self-portraits of his ideal self beyond gender dysphoria, but privately. His final IB Art exhibition did show not only the meaning of his transition, but also the struggle of having his dad and I divorcing at the beginning of his transition. In college, he has purposely gotten away from anything that suggests he’s trans. He took a gap year to have top surgery here at home before transferring to finish his degree. He doesn’t have a connection to famous artists (much like I didn’t as a fiberartist).
On a related note, I had a discectomy and lumbar spinal fusion a couple of years ago. I can relate to cluster headaches. My father had them and he was a test pilot-O2 helped. I chronically have a variant of migraine with aura and am now disabled as a result 40+ years later. I can’t take a lot of meds most can. Can’t offer any helpful advice but I get Botox for my secondary tension headaches. (Also your ex-husband is an absolute tool and I adore your tuxedo kitty.) You’ve been through a lot, but life experiences have a way of preparing you for future situations. You can and will adapt to disability if that ever happens-that I can promise you, as I can still create art despite having to adapt to physical disability and chronic migraines. Hang in there. You have a new subscriber😊
Cat I was hoping to see a video from you for a while. I've often recognised myself with what you say, as a (45 years old) nonbinary gay, disabled (physically + chronic migraine), neurodivergent, trauma survivor mess, of a tortured artist. I always hope that people like you, and I, continue to create. Continue to laugh at the ridiculous horror and beauty that is life. Continue to live. So thanks for uploading this. And I will continue to laugh with you. ❤
13:46 it's called paradoxical smiling. It's thought to be an emotional safety valve that releases deep emotion, chiefly anxiety.
So, yeah. When you're close to the bone on something difficult, and you can't stop the smile from worming its way onto your face, it's an anxiety release.
The 'laughter' that may accompany it, is a tremulous release by the abdominal muscles, not genuine laughter. In fact, you may very much not be laughing, and very much not want to be perceived as laughing, as laughter / smiling is the furthest thing from your mind, yet you can't prevent its onset.
These muscular contractions of the face and abdomen are more like a sneeze, than an expression of emotion, in that they're an involuntary interruption.
I was looking for a name for that, thanks
Or, I was gonna look but didn't
🥲
as a (very) depressed older teen/young adult i always felt like i should be making art about my experience/emotions, but every time i tried it just... didn't hit? it never hit. either that or i never actually ended up making anything at all. i ended up channeling that angst into characters and stories- making them sad and tortured instead. i could never figure out why i couldn't make "vent" art until i took this one online quiz (real surface level personality quiz shit too) that made me think of what emotion i draw my work from. i ended up getting gratitude, which for some unfathomable reason changed my whole mindset, and how i see my own work.
it makes me wonder if people can change what emotion they draw from themself, and how. i think about your artbook Closer, and how with that work you manage to share so much love for the subjects of your paintings. it's beautiful in ways that are starkly different from your past self portraiture. i hope you get the opportunity to pursue more work drawn from love.
Whem my illness paralyzed me i didnt draw for a year but i studied when i could be conscious and luckily i got better at art but i will forever be at risk of losing the ability to draw for months and it wasnt till my partner and friends showed me im not just and artist. and now im an artist who draw disabled rep and an advocate because i love drawing us disabled people and showing we exist, but i also dont want to just do that, its a complex thing but im better now i know im more than just the art i make
"I couldn't find a way to be beautifully tortured, and suffer pretty enough to fulfill this role that I had cast myself in."
This entire video - as with all of your work - is so thought provoking and really makes me seriously analyze what drives me as an artist as well .. but that line in particular resonates with me so deeply and is so profound. I don't necessarily fit the "tortured artist" archetype, but like many I am drawn to them for many reasons (perhaps to use others pain as a way to look at myself through a different perspective) - but that quote does reflect something I've been struggling with recently which is confronting the question of -- why do I make art in the first place? What is it saying ... who is it for ...? And that feeling of not really being "enough" to fulfill what I had set out to do with my art is something that weighs me down a lot ...
Always happy to see you around, Cat - I hope you're healing okay and feeling as good as you can be in the moment. Thank you for sharing your journey here -- sending love. XX
This was so, so good Cat... Still collecting my thoughts but overall, thank you for making this
thank you
wow that is truly "adding injury to insult"
I wish you the best on your surgery and I hope you can recover and live a normal happy life. I haven't had it that bad from my several chronic illnesses but I have long forgotten what a normal person feels like, or what it is to live a week without any kind of pain. I hope this is the start of a new stage of your life where you can finally rest from the hospital visits and build your new happy life from the scratch. I'm excited to see those future paintings of beautiful flowers with no suffering on it :)
welcome back
I missed you but more importantly I’m happy ur sharing your passion
thank you for this video!! it was recommended to me on my homepage, almost as if youtube knows i've been thinking about this topic recently... i've just read van gogh's letters and they very effectively disprove the image that's been thrust upon him in hindsight. it's true that his life included suffering, but suffering is never the whole story because life is never just one thing.
Glad you are with us
that intro was amazing. i just found your channel today from a different vid. i guess the algorithm is doing its thing for you rn
I've been hitting a really rough time in my life as of lately (it really affecting my art) due to past trauma. I definitely needed this video. I hope you are doing better now from your surgery
oh man... I've called myself a baby for crying and screaming over a cluster headache. I had no idea it's one of the most brutal tortures the body had for itself. I'm gonna book a check up jesus christ. im sorry past me
i hope your recovery is going well ! i can't wait to see your beautiful paintings in the future whenever u get to them
It does always sometimes feel so... present, this comparison between suffering and creating. I went through a long period of drawing portraits with botanicals, researching every meaning behind each floral element. Twisted bodies usually isolated and alone because that's how I felt back then. Skip forward 10 years and I'm finally making the work I love, though I made the mistake of asking what people thought of my new work. One response was - "Well... you seem much happier" I found that response extremely observant and yet that hidden meaning that - You're happy thus your artwork sucks now" kinda vibes.
Gosh, people really meant they didn't like your new art by saying you seem much happier now? Id just have to ask them to clarify for me. are you saying you think my artwork isn't as good to you as it used to be and it's because I'm happier now?
@@alisonmercer5946 I did pry a little and they did say that they didn't wish to come across as harsh. Which was polite of them I guess but like to equate them not liking my work to how happy I appeared both disgusted me and confirmed my own self destructive bias at the same time.
thank you for being here. thank you for making videos. thank you for being you. we all love you very much and you enrich this youtube space by putting your art and thoughts out there. pd: rlly good editing in this lol
Thank you for this video. It is very thoughtful and resonant, especially the parts about your early work and getting pigeonholed as the sad trans painter. For a number of years, I made my painting career mostly about my past religious trauma and my queerness, and the messiness of all that. When I was trapped inside during lockdown with nothing but my thoughts, it was an incredible escape and a really necessary part of digging myself out of my anxiety/depression pit. But as I went on, the art kind of worked and I felt like I had dealt with a lot of that pain, but still had to return back to that now-dry well for shows that I had a agreed to. I had one last year that I had to drag myself through and it made me miserable the whole time, and at the end of it I had to take a long break from painting to deal with the burnout and reconsider where I would be going with my work. I have recently begun again after almost a year off, and am excited to see where my work goes when I pull from a different place. I hope you can also get to that point as you start to make work again. Thanks again, it is always good to hear these sorts of thoughts from outside one's own chaotic little brain.
I watched the entire video. Very insightful. You looked great here as the latest version. Now that you’re healing it is time to enjoy the things that bring you joy.
As someone with a creative job who has been bedridden for the last 2 years, thank you for sharing your experience. Your comparison with Frieda Kahlo and the resulting hope but also frustration about your own inability to creatively express yourself and "do shit" is very relatable, which in turn gives me the same feelings when I compare myself to you.
thank you so much for this painfully relatable discussion, and your vulnerability. from one tortured artist that also doesn't want to suffer any more. love you.
I watched this yesterday but felt moved to come back and comment. I'm so glad you're back sharing more of your perspective. I have enjoyed your videos immensely, and my life is better for it. I'm glad you're being supported by your real life connections and pets through this tough time. Take care.
Wow, glad surgery went well and you are on the mend.
Thank you for the video, I miss seeing your name popping up on my notifications. You are one of my favorite artists and I admire how resilient you’ve always been (as a human being, artist or not). I hope you feel better than ever soon, and you get to keep creating whatever makes you happy 🤗
My dad was a painter, and I grew up in his studio surrounded by art. He has a disability, and it was not until I grew up and became a painter myself, and started suffering from my own medical problems that I really wrestled with the relationship between those things. I developed nerve damage in my dominant hand, and I was slowly, but permanently losing my abilities around fine motor control and I had to stop making art for a long time. I couldnt even twist a doorknob or pull up a zipper without horrible pain. It was emotionally really terrifying, and the longer I went without making artwork, I felt my less and less myself. The unused creative energy built up inside me and turned inwards as sadness and apathy, and I started feeling alienated from the work I used to make. Eventually I was able to have surgery and regain a good amount of hand function and after recovering I have a really different perspective. Im grateful I had my dad's example of what it can look like to be a disabled artist whos work is not about suffering. I had to change how I moved my body and used my hand, and it changed my work and what I felt called to make, and that was scary too.
This isnt the first video youve made that made me wish I could talk right through the screen, you have a brilliant way of drawing together concepts that made me feel very seen and connect ideas I hadnt before, so thank you. Often I troll around for grants I might apply for, and the demand upon artists with any sort of experience of suffering or marginalization to explore that in their work is like, almost universal. I want to see the work these same people would make without that pressure, why demand that they publicly unpack it explicitly in order to receive funding..its a bummer. Anway its wonderful to hear the sentiment echoed and unpacked. Wishing you the absolute best recovery possible, your creative energy will never leave you, no matter what form it takes in the future. XOXOXO
Was doing some cleaning when this video dropped so I watched it on my TV. God Cat, I am so sorry you had to go through all of this… one thing after another all in a short time frame… I can’t imagine feeling this first hand. Though, despite how things played out, I’m glad the silver linings for each situation were there. Like the tumor in your spine being found by chance and the hope you had knowing you could make it through because another has done it before. I wish you the damn best Cat.
This probably came off as praising a tortured artist and I’m sorry about that. I just wanna congratulate you for making it through a hard set of circumstances.
I also wanna talk about only being known for one aspect of your work, it’s something I fear for my own work. I work with flipnote studio 3D and I fucking love the app so much but I don’t wanna only be known as a flipnote artist. I worry that if I’m only known for that then no one will care about my other work. Thing is, I don’t practice with my regular digital art skills or my 3D skills enough. Eventually I just gotta work on those kinds of pieces more but rn I’m struggle to focus on them. It’s unfortunate :(
I apologize again if I feel like I’m missing a point, it is now 3 am and I watched this videos hours ago.
damn, I am so sorry about everything that has happened to you.... I really am praying for you to make a full recovery.
I've been craving a new Cat Graffam video! And there's a dog in this one!!
Me too! ❤
so happy to see you back
It’s great to have you back and hope you fully recover soon, even if you objectively love me less.
I love your hair ❤
Agree
its giving joan of the arc. slay.
Hi, and so I'm actually watching this video this morning waiting to see another orthopedic surgeon who will probably tell me he can't do the surgery just like the other two because this is a really hard operation on my knee and most surgeons are not qualified for it and so I felt really connected to you. Or at least I don't feel alone and not as afraid. Thank you.
You are a survivor and I am impressed! Peace be with you!
Tortured/suffering artists and "starving artists" all seem to spring from this idea that art is so joyful to make that you need to have some sort of price to pay for creating it.
i have a strange relationship with my suffering and my art because my art, even the good parts of it (most of my art is very optimistic) is in large part due to my disabilities. I have a fascination with garbage, with still-lives and the mundane, this is foundational to my art. I call myself a rhopographer after all, I deal in the mundane, the average, the discarded. I photograph litter, I write poems about furniture, I draw pigeons. I also have ocd, and what I suspect is the very early manifestations of hoarding disorder. I find myself unable to throw things away, stuffing loose food wrappers into draws and under my mattress, my house slowly filling up with literal garbage I can't get myself to get rid of. my autism is a big driving force in the way I am interested in things, the way I perceive the world, kind of everything. a lot of the core imagery of my poetry comes from my mood issues, swallowing the sun, holding a joy in your chest so bright it will burn you, so intense you fear it will kill you one day.
and my physical pain is a big part of it too. I get almost a sense of the Sublime from my pain? that sort of terror of something larger than you, that has a strange and horrifying beauty to it. the feeling of the train rumbling as I sit on the train floor, head leaned against the metal bar people hold onto, crying, trying not to faint, as the forest of legs surrounding me fluxes and flows seemingly indifferent to my obvious distress, the thunder of the dirty floor permeating my bones. the way I feel this burning river of pain shooting up my legs, as if I stepped on a nail, despite nothing being there. the burning in my chest, the heart palpitations, the funny-bone feeling at the softest touch brushing my elbows, the heavy feeling of my tonsils I hold in my throat, a sort of almost sweetly-flavoured kind of pain. the boring-into-pain in my abdomen, near-constantly. I am an observational poet, and a body is like a room I live in, like a city. so I write about my observations of it.
I think sickness and garbage are more universal, more inherently human themes than things like love. love is great, I love love, but not everyone will or wants to experience it. it is not needed to live a fulfilling life. but everyone has to get sick and everyone has to take out the trash (or pay someone else to do it) and I don't think this is some awful thing, I try to be a very compassionate person, and with that comes a compassion for the parts of the universe I can't control. to acknowledge that my body tries it's best, even if it's best kinda sucks, and that I have things to learn from sickness, things to learn from discomfort. this is my relation to sickness, it does not have to be your's. I am hopelessly in love with mosquitoes, you don't have to do anything I do, or feel anything I feel. but what I feel is still important. i see humans when I see garbage, and that is good and bad, I feel my sickness has taught me things, about my body, about the world, that i would not happen otherwise. I think good and bad things nearly always happen at the same time. this is both a good thing and a bad thing.
i would not choose to be abled. if I had a magic button to make it all go away and to never suffer like this again, i would not be able to get myself to press it. I think these things are baked into the structure of my body, the structure of my brain. I relate a lot to the term "mad". I like the neutrality of it, the non-medical nature of it, the vagueness, the self-definition of it. I could probably write a whole essay about why I like it. i think i could not remove these things entirely and still be me.
sometimes I wonder if the issues with the tourtured artist could not better be dealt with by other concepts- the myth of genius, inspiration porn, ableism, saneism, suicidism, etc. i sort of feel like it is a distraction from the forces that cause it, and we would be better served by discussing those things instead?
Im glad you made this video
this video was perfect length for me to refresh my hair colours for Baltic pride, i together with Riga Queer Choir am performing in the big concert on sunday and am verry stressed about it . i wish you all the best in your life, good luck on the surgeries. i also smile when talking or listening about genuenly horrific things especially when in public :/
To be fair on art girlies Frida Kahlo was literally the only female artist I learned about in high school art class…no wonder so many women are obsessed with her work when the kind of art history education we receive so rarely mentions anyone else.
You should post a cuter picture for your video. I didn’t even recognize you! You are also an amazing artist. I love laughing at serious things in life.
I missed this video when it dropped cuz I didn’t recognize you with your hairstyle!! I’m grateful to have finally watched it through, and I’m grateful that you are still here. I’m sorry life has been shitting on you like this. You will make art when you are ready, and I look forward to seeing whatever form it takes. The industry likes to pigeonhole and tokenize artists as though the whole of them is not genuinely interesting. If you choose to paint flowers or clouds or whatever, I’m interested because I’m here to observe your viewpoint, not tragedy or heroism.
thank you Cat
Absolutely wonderful video, as always. Such a frank and moving exploration of trOWma! So good to see you back and looking so well. Also, that was easily a top 3 impalement joke of all time there, great job. Wishing you all the best!
I’m parasocially invested, bigly.
if you used the word in the sense i read it it is superb. gonna use from now on too
Or maybe one of your self-portraits for the main picture?
Of course you are just as talented or even more talented than Frida❤ I like your paintings better.
Fucking love you Cat
I'm literally making a video right now, where I'm bringing this topic up as well😅
Paint pretty flowers! Brilliant video ❤
💓
Not making work is torture
C2-C3 yikes!
This made me want to live laugh love more with art too. 🤍