Question:
Are most skilled artists "tortured souls"?
By tortured souls, I mean that they are somehow tortured physically or emotionally so they express their emotions in art.
Artists can also be writers, poets, painters, musicians, etc..
Best Answer - Chosen by Asker:
Van Gogh was.
Vincent Van Gogh's life was one of tragedy, pain, loneliness, and misunderstanding. But it also contained a deep sense of compassion for others, powerful feelings of love, ecstatic reactions to nature, and an abiding passion for beauty. Although he was unacknowledged during his lifetime, very few people now are unfamiliar with (or unaffected by) Van Gogh's paintings. Somehow, this alienated, impoverished artist was able to access the deepest parts of himself and communicate some of the most powerful truths about human feeling. In a way, everything Van Gogh painted was a self-portrait: an honest and brutal view of himself and his reactions to the world.
Whether we see the dark, lonely drawings of his father's garden, the glory of his sunlit paintings from Arles, or the portraits of those he was able to coerce into sitting for him, when we gaze at these paintings we see not only the artist's tortured soul, but unacknowledged wounds of our own. Van Gogh wrote, "If a man tries to create thoughts instead of children he is still a part of humanity." In his case, this is eminently true.
An idealist committed to the idea of art as a craft, the strange Dutchman came to Paris in 1886. There he absorbed the atmosphere of Impressionism, its concern with light and color, its emphasis on brushwork, and its desire to capture the reality of the moment. Though powerfully influenced by Impressionism, he did not work with the Impressionist tropes of light and color as studies in beauty; instead, Van Gogh explored their Expressionist possibilities, and invoked the very energy of life with his paintings.
Van Gogh set out for Arles in 1888, the place that was to see his art blossom, his utopian ideals dashed, and his mental health undermined. The light and the landscape were so dazzling to Van Gogh that he called Arles "Japan," referring to the perfect world of his adored Japanese "ukiyo-e" ("floating world") prints. In a burst of activity, he painted gorgeous visions of the countryside, studies of nighttime light, and portraits.
However, isolation took its toll on the artist's psyche. The arrival of Paul Gauguin proved a source of paranoia for Van Gogh. The tension between the two brilliant painters culminated in a bizarre evening when Van Gogh pursued Gauguin with a knife, then fled home and, in a burst of self-loathing, cut off his own ear. From this time on he was confined to hospitals, suffering from periodic seizures and depressions. In the interstices, he painted, imbuing his landscapes with an almost erotic charge. "Starry Night" (1889) shows a countryside sentient with motion and a cloud-swept sky blistered with bursting stars.
But his isolation was complete -- within a year he committed suicide. If the Romantic era imagined the artist as a social misfit, abnormal visionary, and tormented genius, Van Gogh was all of these. Yet he maintained total control over his art, nowhere more fiercely than in the self-portraits that trace his downfall. At the time of his tragic death, Van Gogh had produced 800 paintings and 900 drawings. But only a handful of those were exhibited, and only one sold. C'zanne called his paintings "the work of a lunatic," and history, too, has viewed Van Gogh's art as the product of "mad" genius.