Last night a friend of mine showed me a painting he was working on. I had been persuading him to do a self-portrait for ages since portraits are where his real talents lie. After a sufficient amount of nagging, he finally decided to do an oil painting in 3 colours- white, black and grey.
The background of the painting and the tips of the ears and hair were done in the brightest pristine white, the general extremities and silhouette of the face were a dull grey and finally, the inner most portion of the face- the nose, the eyes were done in the deepest hue of black. It was a striking, visually appealing painting but of course the “meaning” behind it was of real interest.
It didn’t really need much explanation to understand what he wished to convey but I asked for one anyway. According to him, the white represented happiness which was around him but he wasn’t a part of it, the grey represented a neutral territory and the black was sadness- which truly defined him.
Now, like as I would to dismiss it as artistic melodrama, this is a person generally devoid of the trappings of self pity that plague the best of us. He has nothing discernibly ‘wrong’ with his life yet this is how he chooses to describe himself. And that too through a medium he respects too much to use frivolously.
It’s something I’ve thought of frequently in the past- our love affair with misery-real or perceived. There’s something so appealing about believing in the undeniable all pervasive ‘gloom’ is your life. There’s a sense of quiet pride about going through whatever it is you’re going through- the pride of the suffering martyr.
Creativity often seems to require the dismissal of happiness, joy and all that warm fuzzy stuff. They’re sometimes deemed just too unworthy and just plain ‘lame’.
And the proof is there, some of the best works of art, in any form –literary, musical, theatrical, visual- stem from pain or unhappiness.
Why is it that misery is apparently regarded as a more ‘respectable’ emotion? Let’s keep aside genuine causes of sadness (difficult as it may be to define genuine from one person to another). What about those cases where the amount of gloominess is simply not warranted by a person’s circumstances. Or when the reasons one attributes their gloom to just aren’t sufficient? Is it a sign of weakness to indulge yourself and succumb? Or is it a talent-being able to dig into a whole reservoir of emotions for the sake of creativity?
And I’m not even talking about the “the world doesn’t understand me” teenage angst. There are plenty of us more grown up than that, who love to wallow in our whole ‘tortured soul’ personalities from time to time.
A character from a movie I saw a while back sums it up pretty perfectly when she says:
“I have so much. I see it all around me but it stops at my skin. I can’t let it inside.”
Often it’s not a question of not being able to, it’s not wanting to.
