Creative Madness
October 2025

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From the walls of prehistoric caves to the flicker of a contemporary video installation, human beings have always left their marks, sounds, and gestures in the world. It's an instinctive urge to materialize and share ourselves. Could it be that this thing we call art is not so much about beauty, or even meaning, but rather about a need to process our inner life and make it tangible? To touch and be touched? To move and be moved? To know and be known?

I've been thinking about art as a coping mechanism—a way to work through what cannot otherwise be easily understood or carried. This thought took shape in my mind as a pentagon: a five-sided model that maps the emotional patterns I see repeating in creative practice. It's not a formula, but a rhythm. A cycle that unfolds differently throughout life, always beginning with something unresolved and gradually becoming something transformed.

The Pentagon: From Trauma to Love

The pentagon represents five emotional states in a creative process: trauma, madness, creativity, relief, and love. Each corner flows into the next, forming a cycle rather than a linear path.

Trauma is a state of silence—a stillness that prevents something from being said or done. This is where the unsolved rests, where a problem, concern, or wondering stays buried, not yet ready to emerge.

At some point, this stillness begins to shift. It moves toward madness—an unpredictable cracking of silence that activates restless energy. Madness here isn't clinical, but describes the eruption of something that refuses to stay contained. It's movement, often instinctive and urgent.

This movement opens up a creative space. The need to give form to what we feel becomes a way to channel the eruption. It manifests as material practice—words, colors, sounds, gestures. A doing that translates inner chaos into something concrete and external.

This creative act can lead to relief. The feelings that were once trapped inside now exist outside of us in some material form. They're no longer only ours to hold internally, but become something we can look at, analyze, and reflect upon. There's a sense of breathing out.

Eventually, we might arrive at love—a state where we can look back at both our wound and our work without terror. Love here means a kind of peace, a new perspective that allows for growth and movement forward.

The cycle doesn't end there. It starts over with new concerns, different motives, manifesting in new forms. Questions keep arising, and we keep making things in response.

Looking at Art History

When I look at art history through this framework, I see less of a grand narrative of styles and movements, and more a collection of attempts—sometimes urgent, sometimes playful, always deeply human—to make the invisible visible and give shape to what's difficult to grasp.

Francisco Goya, in his Black Paintings (1819–23), covered the walls of his own house with grotesque, haunting images. Saturn devouring his son. Witches, demons, faces emerging from darkness. He painted not for exhibition but for himself, directly onto plaster, as if working through an inner chaos—perhaps an attempt to externalize the fear and isolation he experienced in his later years.

Edvard Munch's The Scream (1893) seems to vibrate with a kind of panic that feels both personal and strangely universal. Frida Kahlo paints her own body split open, pierced, broken—yet her gaze remains steady, as if the act of painting itself offers a way to reclaim something. Van Gogh's turbulent skies might not be symptoms of instability, but rather attempts to make turbulence tangible through deliberate, repeated brushstrokes.

In more recent work, Felix Gonzalez-Torres poured grief into piles of candy, inviting strangers to participate in mourning his lover lost to AIDS. The work becomes a way to translate something deeply personal and overwhelming into a shared, material form.

Art tends to move outward. It doesn't stay contained. Björk's Vulnicura (2015) is heartbreak given sonic form—an album she described as an open wound. By making it external, she makes it something others can encounter and recognize. Later, with Utopia (2017), she shifts toward flutes and birdsong, creating textures that feel more spacious and tender. Together, the two albums seem to trace the pentagon's arc from rupture toward something softer and more open.

A Way of Moving

The pentagon isn't prescriptive, and it doesn't belong only to people who call themselves artists. It might apply to anyone who has felt the need to scribble something down, hum a melody, or make something with their hands. It suggests that making things isn't necessarily a hobby or a luxury, but perhaps a fundamental way humans process what's otherwise hard to hold or understand.

For me, making music has been a way to work with melancholy—to give it structure and turn it into something external that I can engage with differently. I've hesitated to share this work, worried about being reduced to that melancholy. But the pentagon reminds me that the important part is the movement—the shift from one state to another. Creating isn't about fixing the self in place, but about staying flexible, translating experience, and finding new angles of understanding.

In this sense, art functions as a tool and creativity as a method—a material way to move through fog toward something clearer. It becomes a way of knowing, of engaging with the world on terms that feel more accessible. A human capacity that we all seem to carry in different forms.