Sometimes a Painting Is Just an Emotional Breakdown in Disguise

Let’s be honest—some of the best art comes from people working through their shit.

And I don’t mean that in a tortured genius kind of way. I mean regular, human stuff: grief, trauma, boredom, rage, heartbreak, existential panic. You name it, someone has made a painting about it. Or a sculpture. Or a weird installation in the middle of nowhere that involves feathers, mirrors, and their ex’s old t-shirts. Whatever works.

Art doesn’t always come from a place of clarity. Sometimes it comes from not knowing what else to do.

For a lot of artists, the studio is the only place where it makes sense to fall apart. Or to get it together. Or both, depending on the day. Making something—anything—is a way to sort through the noise, to process a mess without having to explain it in words. It’s not always about expressing emotion. Sometimes it’s about finding it in the first place.

You can see this in the work of Louise Bourgeois. She didn’t describe her sculptures as therapeutic, but that’s exactly what they were. Her giant spiders, which might look creepy and menacing at first, were actually symbols of protection—homages to her mother, who was a weaver. Bourgeois spent her life unpacking childhood trauma, loss, and anger through art. She once said, “Art is a guarantee of sanity,” and if you look at her career, you can tell she meant it literally. Her work is personal, raw, and often uncomfortable, because that’s where the healing was.

Jean Dubuffet is another perfect example of someone who used art to navigate a world that didn’t feel particularly sane. He wasn’t interested in polish, or beauty, or anything that looked like it belonged in a museum. His work was messy, impulsive, and often built from materials no one else wanted—sand, tar, gravel, crumpled paper, whatever he could get his hands on. He was drawn to the raw, the childlike, the outsider. And he didn’t separate that from himself. Dubuffet wasn’t pretending to be above the chaos. He was in it, sleeves rolled up, building something out of it.

Frida Kahlo, of course, made the internal external in a way few artists have matched. Her paintings are direct, physical… medical, even. She painted her pain—broken bones, surgeries, loss—not to turn it into metaphor, but to show it exactly as it felt. The work doesn’t ask for sympathy. It asks you to see what endurance actually looks like. She painted to make sure her pain existed outside her body, even if just for a moment.

You don’t have to be dealing with tragedy to work like this. Sometimes the thing that needs processing is less dramatic, but just as real. Routine isolation. Chronic anxiety. The dull ache of trying to keep your life together when everything feels slightly off. Artists don’t always have answers, but they have the tools to turn all of that into something. Sometimes it’s something beautiful. Sometimes it’s just a pile of weird shapes and textures that somehow make more sense than anything else.

There’s a reason a lot of artists work in series. Not because they’re trying to brand themselves or create a “cohesive body of work” for the gallery press release, but because whatever they’re dealing with doesn’t get resolved in one piece. You make a thing, it helps a little. You make another. Still not done. You keep going until something loosens. Or hardens. Or shifts. It’s not about closure. It’s about movement.

Some artists talk about this openly. Others don’t. But you can see it in the work if you’re paying attention. You can feel it in the repetition, in the textures, in the way certain themes come back like bad dreams or inside jokes. That persistence—that refusal to let something sit unprocessed—is part of what makes art personal, even when it’s not autobiographical.

At its core, art is one of the only things that lets you transform internal chaos into something outside of you. Not everyone needs to make art. But the people who do? Often don’t have another option.

And thank god for that.