“Every artist dips his brush in his own soul, and paints his own nature into his pictures” - Henry Ward Beecher

“I experience a period of frightening clarity in those moments when nature is so beautiful. I am no longer sure of myself, and the painting appears as in a dream” - Vincent van Gogh

It is wide-spread knowledge that all ingenious people are a little strange, that their minds work in ways completely different to ours, that their perspective of reality is unlike that of common people. Take Picasso for instance: his vision of reality was utterly different than what you or I see. What about Salvador Dali and his eccentric work? No need to go that far, Vincent Van Gogh himself was a peculiar person. Those are people who likely experienced the above mentioned frightening clarity. When those people sat down to paint, they put a piece of their soul into the canvas; otherwise their work would never have been even half as good! Let’s simplify: if this class sits down and we are given the same assignment: draw a landscape, every single image will be different. Every single person will put a piece of their personality on paper.

For those who were not born with that eccentricity, there was always the little chemical helper: Sigmund Freud used cocaine to help write papers, P.I. Tchaikovsky was friendly with the bottle and the fictional Sherlock Holmes induced himself with cocaine or heroin to get his brain working.

People inducing themselves with drugs is not that new as it turned out. One of the theories of cave painting origins is that a shaman, in other words a spiritual guru of the Stone Age, would climb into a cave and put himself into a trance (with chanting or possibly by smoking/lighting herbs and waiting for the fumes to strike the brain) and paint his visions. He painted what appeared to him in the dark, he was probably unaware of anything going on around him until he was done and snapped out of it. Some of that work would later be used in rituals or spiritual connections to the other realm; after all, the prehistoric peoples believed caves were the entrances to other realities.

Fast forward a dozen thousand years later, and it is very possible that artists still work that way. People who feel a connection to something greater out there would experience surges of inspiration and wouldn’t stop until their work is complete. Similar to when you sit down to write a paper and the ideas just keep flowing and you only take your hands of the keyboard once you’ve typed in that last period and triumphantly hit enter - you’re not sure what’s happened or what’s around you. Has that ever happened to you?