“Your secrets make you sick”, that’s the self-help, mental health and twelve-step cliché, and like many cliché’s, it is not absolute, but largely true, both personally and culturally.  It’s also one of the best reasons to create, consider and support art.  Art is both personal and cultural psychotherapy.  Stuff comes out.  Music gets us past our inhibitions.  Theater and film immerse us in something beyond ourselves.  Literature and poetry ask the questions, provoke our thoughts, and clarify both our natures and our aspirations.  Beauty, revulsion, irony, deceit, nobility, perversion, love, hate, transcendence, and nearly every condition of existence are condensed into painting, sculpture, photography and the various visual arts.

 I spoke to an acquaintance, another artist, at a cocktail party a few weeks ago.  He is struggling with subject matter.  He is talented and skilled, but has reached a frustration in not knowing what to turn that talent and skill toward.  I asked him, “What would you paint for yourself, in a closet, to leave there, where no one would ever, ever see it?”  This question is about our secrets, both kinds, the personal secrets we’re afraid to be judged for, and the secrets of others that we’re afraid to admit judgment of.

This question is also about getting the horse back in front of the cart.  Many years ago, as a psychiatric corpsman for the Navy, I would administer to inpatients what we termed an “art intake”.  This was essentially a simple series of drawings to help get a limited glimpse of a person’s subconscious dynamics, some personality traits, and sometimes their reality testing.  I took them to a quiet room and documented how they looked and acted when asked to draw a series of seven pictures, starting with “a person”, then “the opposite person”, then “a house”, then “what brought you to the hospital”, and so on.  Often the patient, who was a sailor or marine, not an artist, drew stick figures with faces, which was fine.  The skill level was not at all the point, rather the colors chosen, the relation of aspects to each other, the effort or dismissiveness or mystification regarding the subject, what was included or not. These allowed for us, the treatment team, the conscientious observers, to see into what may not have been otherwise obvious or even suggested. 

My experience is that artists often put technique and skill and talent toward what maybe a habituated, incidental, arbitrary or even mercenary subject.  This is the cart before the horse and it enables the personal, cultural and universal secret keepers.  Skill, talent, and effort belong in service of the profound, the mysterious, the transformative, the courageous, and the sublime.  This is what we aspire to, to have the skill and talent to bring into physicality - and do justice to - what we feel, hide, believe and long for. 

That said - in print - I have to go hide my head under a pillow for a while.