The California fires are on many people’s minds these days. Here, in the United States, many of us know and love people whose lives and homes rest in the fire danger zone or are now ashes. Tragic wildfires, historic hurricanes, earthquakes, tsunamis, and devastating droughts are striking around the world. Creatives and their art are being caught up in these disasters. The anxiety and tragedy surrounding a calamity can affect even those not directly affected by the calamity. The way to preserve your creative self during times of intense pain and loss is to care for your needs and to look to history for inspiration.
Your Needs
Your number one priority in any disaster is to take care of you and your loved ones. Follow the directions of your local fire and police officials. They offer connections to resources for your basic needs.
If you aren’t currently in a danger zone, here’s a small sampling of sites to help in America: try The National Fire Protection Association and the American Red Cross. In Europe: European Forest Fire Information System. In Canada: Canadian Wildland Fire Information System. And in Australia: Frontline Wildfire Defense. There are all kinds of articles on the web about what to do when escaping a wildfire. Do your due diligence and get information firsthand from officials and organizations that deal with these types of disasters.
Your Creativity
There is no one right way to respond creatively to a tragedy, whether it is a personal, national, or world disaster. However, there are four common reactions creatives have to trauma.
You Cannot Create
If even the thought of trying to create ratchets up your anxiety, give yourself time. Your body and brain are doing what they are hard-wired to do to protect you from all the emotions that come with trauma. You may feel frustrated or trapped. Be kind to yourself. Depending upon how long this creative block lasts, you may benefit from talking to a trusted friend, clergy person, or a professional therapist. If your inability to practice your art feeds your emotional pain, depression, anxiety or leads to addiction—seek professional help.
Accessing Your Creative Space Re-Traumatizes You
Unhealed trauma can trap you in old, painful patterns. Depression, anxiety, or addictions can emerge from those unresolved emotional wounds and lead to a loop of creative decline. The most important thing to do is to get to the root of your traumatic experiences and understand their impact on you. For this, you will most likely need some professional help.
You Are Very Creative But Not Healing
You can access your creative space and make music, books, paintings, fashions, or build businesses. However, outside of that creative space, you live with unresolved emotional pain. This often exhibits itself as anxiety, depression, and/or addictions.
You Are Actively Transforming Your Pain into Creative Projects
In your case, your internal healing and creativity work synergistically. Your creativity heals and transforms you.
These four reactions can be fluid with you moving between these states as you deal with your emotional healing.
Some creatives are afraid to heal from old emotional traumas. They fear they’ll lose their creative drive. That fear is very real. Find a therapist who understands that fear and can help you work through it. In truth, healing enhances creativity. Healed, you can step fully into your emotional, creative space. Your old traumas inform new, authentic art.
How History Can Help
Our history is full of traumas. It’s also filled with incredible works of art from all kinds of artists and creatives.
Underground Railroad
Enslaved Africans and African Americans escaped from slavery as early as the 16th century. By the 1780s, some escaped and freed slaves created a network of safe houses to help slaves escape to North America, Canada, Mexico, Spanish Florida, and the Caribbean. Traditional spirituals like, “Follow the Drinking Gourd,” “Go Down Moses,” and “Swing Low Sweet Chariot,” became a means of communication and inspiration. The folks who established those may not have written the lyrics, but they found a creative way to use them!
World War I 1914-1918
The War to End All Wars had a profound impact on creatives across the world.
Dadaism was an art style that most scholars say got its origin in Switzerland. Dada art was an anti-war and anti-bourgeois, often satiric and nonsensical. The movement influenced and created new art forms in performance arts, photography, sculpture, painting, and collage. Leading artists included Arp, Marcel Duchamp, Francis Picabia and Kurt Schwitters.
The Spanish Flu Pandemic, 1918-1920
A subtype of the influenza A virus, the Spanish Flu, killed somewhere between 25 – 100 million people worldwide. There’s been no consensus on the numbers of deaths or the place where the flu originated. At the time it struck, there were no vaccines to prevent it and no antibiotics to treat secondary bacterial infections. The uneven application of basics like isolation and quarantine, even good personal hygiene and the use of disinfectants, allowed the wildfire-like spread of the illness.
Norwegian painter Edvard Munch contracted and survived the illness. He expressed some of his feelings in his paintings, “Self-Portrait with the Spanish Flu” and “Self-Portrait After the Spanish Flu” are stunning.
Marcel Breuer, who started at the Bauhaus in 1920, designed minimalist pieces of wood and steel which historians believe the flu and the need to facilitate cleaning inspired him.
Pale Horse, Pale Rider is a short novel written by Katherine Anne Porter about the pandemic. As is William Maxwell’s, They Came Like Swallows.
World War II, September 1, 1930- September 2, 1945
The Second World War changed art and literature and fashion again. Who can forget the iconic photograph of raising the flag on Iwo Jima by Joe Rosenthal or The Diary of Anne Frank by Anne Frank?
Music and movies and literature examples are everywhere. Mary Corbet’s site Needle ’n Thread has a page with images of the work of WWII embroidery artists. Do an internet search for your creative form. I’ll bet you find an artist or two.
The Civil Rights Movement
The Civil Rights Movement was a social and political campaign in the United States from 1954 to 1968. Leaders aimed to abolish legalized racial segregation, discrimination, and the disenfranchisement of African Americans. They used a variety of ways to bring the issues to the public from sit-ins, boycotts, protest marches, freedom marches, lobbying the government, lawsuits. And songwriters-activists like Nina Simone wrote powerful music like, “I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel to Be Free.”
Vietnam War 1955-1975
You can find movies, television, and photographs of the Vietnam war with a simple internet search. The Humanity Archive has a fascinating article called “The Healing Impact of Vietnam War Art.”
2011 Earthquake & Tsunami
Born in Japan in 1974 to Chinese parents, artist Have Yoshimoto immigrated to the U.S. in 1984. Televised and internet images of the disaster that left more than 16,000 dead haunted Yoshimoto. For days, he could not sleep. Things got better when he chose to use his talents to “honor those who lost their lives and homes that day.” He spent 328 days painting his “scroll project.” He has donated all proceeds from the sales of prints of his project to a charity to build an art center for youth in Sendai, where the tsunami hit the hardest.
2013 Rim Fire
The Rim Fire was massive wildfire that started in a remote canyon in the Stanislaus National Forest in the state of California (U.S.) Textile Artist Linda Glass sewed “Severely Burned,” a map of the damage from the largest recorded fire in the Sierra Nevada.
Women’s Marches in America 2017
Jayna Zweiman and Krista Suh found common ground in their passion for women’s rights and conceived the idea of creating a sea of pink hats at Women’s Marches everywhere. Such a sight would make both a bold and powerful visual statement of solidarity, and also allow people who could not take part themselves–—whether for medical, financial, or scheduling reasons — a visible way to support women’s rights. Little Knittery owner Kat Coyle designed a simple and brilliant pattern that would allow people of all knitting levels to be part of the project. Thus the Pussyhat was born. Not the usual kind of trauma, but a trauma to many none the less.
Moving Forward
The above examples are a tiny sample of various artists who took the emotional fallout of a traumatizing war or disaster and used their creativity to help heal themselves and others. Crisis-inspired creativity can be something you keep private, but it can also help others.
You may think you aren’t brave enough to share your trauma-related art, but you are braver than you think. It is my firm belief that all creatives are incredibly brave people. You put your heart and soul into your art form and you keep returning to it. That’s brave. Brave enough to face the emotional traumas in your life. Brave enough to express your trauma and healing through your creative endeavors.
This week’s fires in California may inspire you to donate your talents. It may inspire you to journal privately. Whether your creative work becomes something of historical significance or of family sentimental value, do it. Traumas or disasters don’t have to be the end of your creativity. Reach out to your trusted creative friend or circle of friends. Keep creating.
Please share creative work born out of crisis or trauma that you have seen or created.
I’ll start.
My Soul to Keep, The Fellowship Dystopia Book One, includes some of my personal traumas and was once called a “therapy piece” by a colleague. I kept writing and revising for many, many years to make it a work that other women read and find a road to their own healing.
References:
Image Credits:
Santa Clarita Wildfire, Jeff Turner, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons
Self Portrait with the Spanish Flu, Edvard Munch, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Wassily Chair by Marcell Breuer, reproduction 1925, Daderot, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons
Raising the flag at Iwo Jima Joe Rosenthal, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Pussyhat photo, Ted Eytan, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons
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