Essays

Healing the soul

About pain and suffering it has been written and thought a lot since antiquity because they are signs of the human condition: we all experience pain and suffering at some point in our existence. But how do we interpret pain and suffering? How do they affect and influence in our lives?

Pain and suffering are unique, personal, yet difficult to verify using empathy. It is also hard to explain what one feels when suffering, to be understood, to find an expression for the suffering one is experiencing so intimate.

Artists, used to work from a sensitive and spiritual point of view, have expressed the suffering of themselves and others on many occasions throughout history. Suffering can be ‘said’ and many artists have done their art works to speak it and even to shout it out loud.

As well as we talk about the uniqueness of a work of art, the same can be said of the experience of suffering as something intimate and that takes different forms in each individual. Each person accepts and reacts to pain and suffering in a different way, even for many individuals suffering is a way to enter into a mode of deep knowledge of themselves and a way to make questions about the relationship between human beings and the world.

What to do about suffering? Many artists have used paint as a vehicle of expression, as a mean for understanding the suffering, as, in the words of Louise Bourgeois, an exorcism: “The existence of pains can not be denied. I do not propose remedies or excuses. I just want to watch them and talk about them. ” [1]

Body and spirit, sickness and suffering are recurrent themes in the works of the Norwegian painter Edvard Munch where he shows his feelings and experiences about anguish, loneliness and death. Lucian Freud, Francis Bacon, E. Hopper, Millais, Dürer, Goya, Van Gogh, P. Gauguin, Friedrich, Frida Kahlo and a long list of artists have shown us in some of their works, their vision about suffering not only in a subjective way but intersubjective as well, embedded in his time and culture.

The artist seeks inside and also looks at the subject and with this mechanism might say something about suffering and may even surpass it, sublime it, because the common position in front of this situation is not one of denial, but a transformative attitude consciously or not.

[1] Mayayo, P.: Louise Bourgeois, Ed Nerea, Guipúzcoa, 2002

Antonio Melo Montero

http://www.saatchi-gallery.co.uk/blogon/view_submitted_essay.php/395

No tittle [artwork for the V Conference on Medicine and Philosophy 'Sickness and Suffering', Universidad de Sevilla, Spain]