By Yasmine Nassar | Staff Writer
Art has long been a space for self-expression and emotional manifestation. Artists use their feelings as inspiration, and use art as a creative opportunity in which colors can tell one part of the story while illustrations do the other. With their abilities, artists portray the most wretched and intense emotions through divine artworks, some of which are universally known and admired. Grief isn’t a simple emotion to handle by oneself, which is why artists resort to easing the pain by generating beautiful artistic pieces that grasp their feelings and share them with the world.
While we attempt to ignore the grief and deny the pain, art allows for the imagination to display it in expressive images and vibrant colors. The creation of art releases the tension of grief and provides the artist with a contained environment to liberate their emotions. As a demonstration of grief in a painting, Edvard Munch’s world-renown “The Scream” composition made in 1893 is the perfect example. In his piece, Munch draws a distorted figure of a human screaming as two silhouettes appear walking away in the background of the portrait.
According to Munch, the piece is an autobiography of an incident that occurred to him as he was walking with two companions while the sun was setting: he felt a sudden surge of tiredness, so he paused a bit and heard the “scream of nature”. Decipherers have inferred that Munch had a panic attack from exhaustion and anxiety, where he felt lonely as his two friends proceeded their stroll unaware that he was feeling anxious. Due to this translation of the artist’s words, the painting is now seen as a symbol of anxiety. Edvard Munch’s life was far from peaceful, as his mother and sister died early on and he never had children, which explains his need to tell his story through paintings. Despite his tragedies, he blessed the world with his artistic gifts and set the scene for the progressive modern art movements of the 20th century.
Sometimes the inspiration lies in another artist’s work, be it a painting, drawing, movement, music, or a written text. Shakespeare was a popular muse for Victorian painters, and the most iconic figure to be taken from his plays was his tragic-romantic character Ophelia in Hamlet. One artist who drew Ophelia is John Everett Millais; his painting is one of the finest works to have come from the Pre-Raphaelite movement. He drew the scene in which Ophelia was drowning in a small river in Denmark. This scene displays Ophelia, out of her mind with grief, lying in the water singing and unaware of the danger that follows her. However, eventually, her soaked garments pulled her from her lay to “muddy death”, as Shakespeare wrote. Millais’s painting can be found on display at the Tate Britain in London where it honors Shakespeare’s Ophelia in all the elements Shakespeare hoped an illustration could.
When we think of grief, one of the first situations to come to mind is war. Nowadays we have enough examples of the grief war causes in the Zionist attacks against Palestine and the Russian attacks against Ukraine. War causes universal sadness and sympathy, which is why art inspired by it can resonate so strongly with viewers and gains everlasting recognition.
Picasso expressed his fury against war in 1937 with Guernica, his gigantic mural-sized painting found at the Paris World’s Fair, which has become the 20th century’s strongest indictment against war. Picasso’s painting was inspired by the events of April 27, 1937, when Hitler commanded his German air force to bomb the village of Guernica, which doesn’t have a strategic military force, in northern Spain. In his painting, Picasso portrayed the pain of many Guernica martyrs and caused moments of grief to whoever passes by the painting and recalls the tragic events.
Nothing unveils an artist’s hidden talents like grief does. Most of the iconic art pieces are made once grief rules the artist, which results in its relatability that moves the soul from within. By art, I don’t simply mean paintings, but also other forms of artistic expressions we encounter regularly- be it songs that are accompanied by upbeat music to hide their melancholic feel or those whose tunes intensify the gloomy sensation. The same goes for paintings, where their impressive use of color, brushstrokes, size of the portrait, and background can play the exact same role as the tunes do in music.