Updated:2024-10-09 09:45 Views:132
A DECADE AGO, the artist Thomas Houseago never would have imagined himself painting flowers. The sculptor, 52, who grew up in Leeds, England, and has been based in Malibu, Calif., since 2003, became known for making hulking monsters and masks — their inner workings displayed like those of half-dissected cadavers. His textured figures were chalky white plaster on one side; on the other, the material appeared to have been stripped away to reveal iron rebar and hemp. Critics described the work as “vulnerable” for its willingness to lay bare the creative process. But Houseago now says he was using this art to avoid confronting his own pain, perpetuated by the sexual abuse that a group of men, including his father, had inflicted upon him in early childhood.
After his father died in 2019, unearthing long-suppressed memories, Houseago had a mental breakdown. “I was beating myself with a rock,” he recalls. “It was very primitive.” He spent 70 days in an Arizona rehabilitation center. It was the first time that he’d been able to speak about the abuse.
“My work prerecovery — it was gnarly, it was scary,” Houseago says from the backyard of his studio. A redhead with close-set eyes who intensely holds one’s gaze even over Zoom, he spoke for two and a half hours, barely taking so much as a sip of water. “I was abused at night as a kid,” he says. In many of his previous works, “I quite literally show myself what had been done to me.” At Rockefeller Center in 2015, Houseago erected a pentagon of 16-foot-tall skull-like masks, each more abstract and crumbling than the next. Viewers were invited to walk inside and peer out of their sunken eye sockets. (“My half sister said, ‘You know the skull face? That’s your dad,’” says Houseago. “I was retraumatizing myself with the art.”)
Image
Upon leaving rehab, Houseago didn’t think he’d return to the studio. But his therapist encouraged him to reframe his relationship with art in the same way that he was learning to retrain his mind, to acknowledge the darkness and then call in something lighter to counterbalance it. In one of his flower paintings from 2020, a purple California thistle bursts open in the foreground like a splatter-painted firework; in the background, trees with wiggly, veinlike branches spread across the surface, devolving into single brushstrokes the farther out they extend.
Mental illness has long been associated with artistic genius, with recovery viewed almost as the enemy of virtuosity. “Before the problem of the creative artist,” Sigmund Freud wrote in the late 1920s, “analysis must, alas, lay down its arms.” In 2016, the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam organized the exhibition “On the Verge of Insanity: Van Gogh and His Illness,” examining the Dutch artist’s late work alongside the progression of his depression. Not only has suffering been seen as romantic, and maybe even necessary, for art but it’s almost as if we wanted creators to channel the world’s pain into their work so that we don’t have to feel it ourselves. Many longtime coping mechanisms for artists — drugs and alcohol, which are themselves often part of the creative mystique — can also be career killers, if they don’t kill you outright. As Houseago puts it, “How do you integrate into a society that sort of wants you to die?”
We are having trouble retrieving the article content.
Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.
Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.
Thank you for your patience while we verify access.
Already a subscriber? Log in.
Want all of The Times? Subscribe.2kbet