A DECADE AGO, the artist Thomas Houseago never would have imagined himself painting flowers. The sculptor, 52, who grew up in Leeds, England, and has been based in Malibu, Calif., since 2003, became known for making hulking monsters and masks — their inner workings displayed like those of half-dissected cadavers. His textured figures were chalky white plaster on one side; on the other, the material appeared to have been stripped away to reveal iron rebar and hemp. Critics described the work as “vulnerable” for its willingness to lay bare the creative process. But Houseago now says he was using this art to avoid confronting his own pain, perpetuated by the sexual abuse that a group of men, including his father, had inflicted upon him in early childhood.
After his father died in 2019, unearthing long-suppressed memories, Houseago had a mental breakdown. “I was beating myself with a rock,” he recalls. “It was very primitive.” He spent 70 days in an Arizona rehabilitation center. It was the first time that he’d been able to speak about the abuse.
“My work prerecovery — it was gnarly, it was scary,” Houseago says from the backyard of his studio. A redhead with close-set eyes who intensely holds one’s gaze even over Zoom, he spoke for two and a half hours, barely taking so much as a sip of water. “I was abused at night as a kid,” he says. In many of his previous works, “I quite literally show myself what had been done to me.” At Rockefeller Center in 2015, Houseago erected a pentagon of 16-foot-tall skull-like masks, each more abstract and crumbling than the next. Viewers were invited to walk inside and peer out of their sunken eye sockets. (“My half sister said, ‘You know the skull face? That’s your dad,’” says Houseago. “I was retraumatizing myself with the art.”)
Upon leaving rehab, Houseago didn’t think he’d return to the studio. But his therapist encouraged him to reframe his relationship with art in the same way that he was learning to retrain his mind, to acknowledge the darkness and then call in something lighter to counterbalance it. In one of his flower paintings from 2020, a purple California thistle bursts open in the foreground like a splatter-painted firework; in the background, trees with wiggly, veinlike branches spread across the surface, devolving into single brushstrokes the farther out they extend.
Mental illness has long been associated with artistic genius, with recovery viewed almost as the enemy of virtuosity. “Before the problem of the creative artist,” Sigmund Freud wrote in the late 1920s, “analysis must, alas, lay down its arms.” In 2016, the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam organized the exhibition “On the Verge of Insanity: Van Gogh and His Illness,” examining the Dutch artist’s late work alongside the progression of his depression. Not only has suffering been seen as romantic, and maybe even necessary, for art but it’s almost as if we wanted creators to channel the world’s pain into their work so that we don’t have to feel it ourselves. Many longtime coping mechanisms for artists — drugs and alcohol, which are themselves often part of the creative mystique — can also be career killers, if they don’t kill you outright. As Houseago puts it, “How do you integrate into a society that sort of wants you to die?”
TODAY, A GROWING number of artists are arguing that healing is a far more generative force than anguish. And while this notion might seem obvious to younger generations, who grew up sharing their diagnoses and self-care strategies on TikTok, it’s especially powerful for those who embraced therapy later in life.
The Nashville-based painter Shannon Cartier Lucy, 46, found her signature style — surreal, cinematic scenes like a fishbowl on a stove — only after studying to become a psychotherapist and practicing visualizations in therapy herself. Her images are in part inspired by her father, who had schizophrenia and filled the house, she says, with “a bizarre montage of objects,” from chairs stacked on top of a mattress to a Bible in the dishwasher.
Last year, TM Davy, 44, of New York, shifted from painting his community of friends on Fire Island to luminous scenes of fairies and satyrs as part of a broader quest that included talk therapy, group singing and meditation. He first began discussing fairies as a metaphor for play and self-discovery with his therapist. Rather than painting “one person on the beach,” Davy says, he wanted to paint “the feeling of magic in the air.” An independent exploration of parts therapy — which involves reconciling disparate parts of the self — also helped him conjure images of big-eared, pint-size gremlins. Davy considers these “tiny monsters” expressions of his inner child.
Some artists, like Joel Mesler, who is 50 and based in Sag Harbor, N.Y., have gone further in integrating therapy into their work: Mesler spent seven months talking to his therapist about his latest exhibition, a series of installations tracing key moments in his life, at Lévy Gorvy Dayan in Manhattan. In one room, every surface, from the plinths to sculptures of beach balls, was covered in a blue underwater pattern, recalling a pool party that his mother threw for him as a child. In another space, tropical wallpaper evoked the Beverly Hills Hotel, where his father had a nervous breakdown when Mesler was an adolescent. Mesler’s therapist even conducted their weekly sessions in a makeshift office open to visitors at the gallery over the course of the show.
“Without therapy, I think I would’ve stopped making art,” says the New York-based artist Margaret Lee. A longtime assistant to Cindy Sherman and a co-founder of the downtown gallery 47 Canal, the 44-year-old is the kind of person who asks her therapist for reading assignments in between sessions. (Ahead of our interview, she sent me a 14-page excerpt from “The Shell and the Kernel” by Maria Torok and Nicolas Abraham, an approach to Freud that employs a less reductive version of psychoanalysis.) Lee made her name as an artist in the early 2010s with hyperrealistic plaster-cast sculptures of mundane objects like potatoes and watermelons.
But her work changed in 2019, four years after she began seeing a therapist. As Lee looked into child development, she became interested in exploring a preverbal version of herself in therapy and turned toward abstraction, which she describes as the artistic version of baby talk. Her latest works, which were on view at Jack Hanley Gallery in TriBeCa in the spring, present simple washes of yellow paint and, in her words, “anxious and shaky” dark lines. The paintings, she says, are “about how things in your psyche can shift and move.” She hopes the sequence of lines skittering across the surface communicates to viewers that depression, artist’s block and desperation aren’t permanent states of being, either.
Therapy isn’t a new influence on art. In the 1920s, Surrealists like Salvador Dalí and André Masson adapted the technique of free association from psychoanalysis to produce automatic drawings, which summoned their unconscious thoughts on paper or canvas. The Abstract Expressionist Joan Mitchell named one of her most spectacular works — a four-panel painting from 1981 awash in purple and golden yellow brushstrokes — after her longtime psychoanalyst Edrita Fried. The sculptor Louise Bourgeois drew on decades of analysis while creating a body of work studded with round, breastlike forms, phallic protrusions and oblique references to her mother, whose death from complications related to a chronic lung condition when Bourgeois was 20 would haunt the artist for the rest of her life.
But until recently, it was predominantly the darkness that guided the art. The contemporary artists who’ve made therapy a major part of their practice have no uniform style, but they all share a feeling: that relief from their pain is possible. “Sometimes the work is clumsy, and I’m ashamed of it,” Houseago says. “But the clumsiness allows something else in.”
The post What Happens When Artists Start Going to Therapy? appeared first on New York Times.
