Schizophrenia and the Art of Louis Wain
Posted by Mentally Interesting on April 2, 2006
This is ancient news in a the blogosphere, posted in late February by Neatorama but I didn't have a blog yet plus I think its cool so I'm writing about it anyways.
A Cornell student's project "Schizophrenia, Aging and Art" includes a section about the artist Louis Wain born in 1860 and a victim of late onset Schizophrenia. He drew cats in fanciful situations for newspapers and children's books. From the Cornell page:
During the onset of his disease at 57, Wain continued to paint, draw and sketch cats, but the focus changed from fanciful situations, to focus on the cats themselves.
Characteristic changes in the art began to occur, changes common to schizophrenic artists. Jagged lines of bright color began emanating from his feline subjects. The outlines of the cats became sever and spiky, and their outlines persisted well throughout the sketches, as if they were throwing off energy.
Soon the cats became abstracted, seeming now to be made up of hundreds of small repetitive shapes, coming together in a clashing jangles of color that transform the cat into something resembling an Eastern deity.
The abstraction continued, the cats now being seen as made up by small repeating patterns, almost fractal in nature. Until finally they ceased to resemble cats at all, and became the ultimate abstraction, an indistinct form made up by near symmetrical repeating patterns.
BoingBoing.net posted about this shortly after Neatorama's post and they recieved a response from researcher Mark Pilkington that suggested that the drawings (all undated) were only later assembled to suggest the influence of Schizophrenia.
But think the drawings are fascinating, regardless.
L K Tucker said
I had known of the art but not that the artist was schizophrenic. If you recall there have been other artists with psychiatric problems.
Schizophrenia is a diagnosis in the DSM, nothing more. There is no knowledge of a cause. Many things are blamed.
There is a simple explanation for why artists are at high risk. They have behaviors that allow Subliminal Distraction exposure. Although a normal feature in the physiology of sight SD was discovered to cause mental breaks for office workers in the 1960’s.
The mental investment to paint is the same level of concentration as that of office workers. All that is needed for exposure and the mental break is to work where there is repeating detectable movement in peripheral vision.
VisionAndPsychosis.Net traces SD exposure in several activities to show it not only causes the believed to be harmless temporary episode but with low level long term exposure it creates a fixed altered mental state that resemble Schizophrenia.
Users of QiGong and Kundalini Yoga believe they can levitate, walk through solid objects, and read your mind/control your actions through mental telepathy. These beliefs are called “psychotic-like” but they are no different than the delusions of schizophrenia.
It is not possible to prove that the brain atrophy of schizophrenia is caused by Subliminal Distraction. Rather Schizophrenia as an altered mental state can be imposed on any number of brain problems. All that is needed is competent peripheral vision and the ability to form a vision reflex. That is the reason there are so many beliefs of causation.
Those with atrophy lose the mental facility to reason and recover.
CarriKP said
The ’schizophrenia’ in Louis Wain’s case was due to concussion resulting from a head injury sustained when he was thrown from a bus.
Diagnoses in those days were very accurate – what he had was a brain injury.