Arts & International Affairs: Volume 2, Number 2 | Page 64

J. P. Singh:
I think what you’re saying applies to Hollywood so well. It tends to be
a creative town, but all the conflicts are about them not being able to
communicate about the process.
Dorothy Miell:
Everybody feels marginalized when it goes wrong. And the first thing you
have to do is just to recognize, where that’s starting to happen, naming it and
saying, actually I think we’ve misunderstood each other here.
J. P. Singh:
Well, what’s brilliant about this is that we started a conversation with how
artists name the outside world, but we’re now talking about naming of their
own world.
Dorothy Miell:
I think we don’t talk about the process of creative working enough. We talk
about the final product, but that emerges from the collaboration. I feel very
strongly that our education system needs to focus more on helping students
understand and work with that process.
J. P. Singh:
I once read somewhere that Gustav Mahler stopped composing after he went
to therapy and reached a calmer place in his life. He was not as productive as
when he was unhappy. Is this too much a romantic notion of the artist and
his or her process?
Dorothy Miell:
There is a lot of evidence of connections between mental health challenges
and artistic creativity. If you make somebody entirely happy, some would
argue that you’re not likely to get a lot of great art out of that. It’s the idea
that you need people to either be unhappy, very out of tune with their
surroundings, or very splintered internally. Whether it’s internal fault lines
or cognitive disassociation, perhaps that is what gives the creative spark.
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