How many famous painters suffered from a mental illness?
What makes an artist? What drives someone to create a painting, a composition or write a novel? While many academic categories of art exist, not every artist easily fits into prescribed meanings. Alan Russell-Cowan is one such artist. Afflicted with paranoid schizophrenia, we watch Cowan struggle with the desire to be a great painter, while battling delusions and auditory hallucinations. My Name is Alan and I Paint Pictures examines Cowan’s life, the role art and painting play in it, and how mental illness intertwines with artistic creation and perception. For Alan, painting becomes a cure for his symptoms, the means of his release – yet for us his painting means much more. It is an alternative perspective on art and life, a world of mental illness visually reconstructed for viewers who never experience this themselves Through Alan’s life and work, we can examine the wider art world, questioning the means and rationale behind contemporary critical judgment of art. Check out the Documen
There were quite a few: The Swedish painters Ernst Josephson and Carl Fredrik Hill, both born in the middle of the 19th century. They both studied painting at the Stockholm Academy, and due to their mental illnes their art changed considerably. Both are considered as important inspirations for Modern artists such as Picasso ans the german Expressionists, for instance. In the 18th / 19th centuries, the British painter Richard Dadd and the Swiss painter Johann Heinrich Füssli (Also spelled Fuseli in England and America) are examples of mentally unstable or ill artists. In the 20th century Adolf Wölfli, Louis Soutter, and Gaston Chaissac are only the most well-known artists of a style that was called “art brut” by the French painter Jean Dubuffet. There are quite a few more. In Austria, the psychologist Leo Navratil worked in a clinic in Gugging, beginning in the 1960s to teach mentally ill patient to make art. The artists of Gugging (Johann Hauser, Oswald Tschirtner, August Walla, Franz
