My Interview With Kathryn Vercillo About The Artist's Mind, Her Awesome New Book

Kathryn is the writer who interviewed me, and now I get to interview her!

Photo credit: Wendi Gordon. Me holding Kathryn Vercillo’s book The Artist’s Mind.

I’m excited to share my interview of Kathryn Vercillo about her latest book, The Artist’s Mind, with you. For anyone not already familiar with Kathryn, she is a writer/artist who explores the complex relationship between art and mental health. Her own experience of crocheting through life-threatening depression led her to begin researching that relationship and get a Masters Degree in Psychological Studies.

She now researches and writes about this subject full-time, and I discovered her work by way of her Substack newsletter, Create Me Free, which includes her interview of me:

Meet Wendi: A Mental Health And Art Interview

Now, on to my interview of her.

1. What made you want to write a book about artists and their mental health issues?

I came to this niche of research and writing over the last couple of decades, something that was shaped by a fusion of my life experiences and personal passions. During my late twenties, I experienced life-threatening depression. I found solace and healing in the art of crochet, an unexpected lifeline that helped me overcome my struggles, something I shared in my book Crochet Saved My Life and more recently in a podcast episode for Why I Knit.

Intrigued by the mental well-being benefits of crochet, I started documenting its effects from my own perspective, and through conversations with others, my interest grew deeper. … I eventually pursued a Masters in Psychological Studies, eager to delve further into the human psyche.

However, my exploration didn't end with crochet; it extended to my other passion: writing. As I battled recurring depression, I observed how it affected my creativity. During bouts of mental fog, my writing suffered, yet the simple act of picking up a crochet hook and yarn remained unaffected, allowing me to create something tangible.

This fascination with the interplay between mental health symptoms and creativity became the focus of my current work - going beyond exploring the therapeutic benefits of art/craft and into a more nuanced look at how mental health symptoms impact artistic content, process, creativity, medium, self-perception, and reception by others. …

 I am fascinated by the way creativity and mental health are related for me personally, and I write in part to gain a deeper understanding of that … As for why a book … I am a voracious reader and love books so I like to write them …

2. How did you decide which artists to include?

This book came to life as a collaboration with Sartle, a website that brings art history to life by revealing the stories behind the art. It offers a contemporary take on art, with humor, interesting facts, and rich details that consider the social, economic, class, race, gender, and other aspects of the art world. Alongside writing local exhibition reviews for Sartle, I also contributed blog posts about mental health in art history. This book is an expansion of that. The artists were chosen in collaboration with Sartle through a combination of pairing my own lists of artists that interested me with the collection of artists in their database.

Originally, we planned to include images of the artwork from each artist, so we were focusing on artists for whom Sartle had image rights. The book's scope was limited by Sartle's specific selection of art and artists for editorial reasons. Despite these constraints, we made an effort to represent diversity in terms of gender, race, age, mental health challenges, and more.

The book features visual artists, primarily painters and a few sculptors. Ultimately, we didn’t end up including images of the art (editorial changes, financial impact of COVID on the publishing details …) but the work was already written so we stuck with those artists.

I really see this as just a starting point for my work in this area. I see years ahead of continuing to research and write about lesser-known artists and artists in other disciplines including writing, filmmaking, performance art, etc.

(Personal aside: While Kathryn sees The Artist’s Mind as a starting point for her work in this specific area, she has already written other books related to the broader topic of mental health and creativity that may interest you. Cracked Wide Open is the one I’m most eager to read.)

Image credit: Kathryn Vercillo

3. What sources did you use to learn about the mental health issues of each artist, especially those who were deceased and/or never diagnosed with a mental illness?

Almost all of the artists in the book had diagnosed mental health issues, or at the very least enough documented material about their experiences that mental health symptoms could be inferred. (There’s a note in the book about diagnosis, especially historic and posthumous diagnosis.)

But of course the available information for each artist varied a lot. Some of the artists were very open about their conditions and the impact they had on their work. Others, such as Agnes Martin, didn’t reveal their conditions in their lifetime, and didn’t believe that there was a relationship between their art and their mental health. So everything in the book should be taken with a grain of salt in terms of official diagnosis. Ultimately, I believe we are all artists with mental health experiences, regardless of diagnosis.

To answer your question more precisely, though, you’ll see from the bibliography in the book, I used A LOT of resources to gain information. … I read print books on each artist as well as articles from mental health journals and online material from sources such as The New York Times. I supplemented that in some cases with watching related documentaries and looking at the art work, in person when possible (there was an Alice Neel exhibit here and I saw an Agnes Martin piece at SFMoMA for example), from the artist to add dimension to what I was reading about.

My favorite of all of the resources I came across was Frida Kahlo: Song of Herself by psychiatrist Salomon Grimberg. Near the end of her life, Kahlo was interviewed by a psychologist friend Olga Campos for a book about the creative process of artists, but that interview didn’t end up published at the time. Grimberg takes that interview and turns it into a book with biographical context and psychological insights. As I was reading this book, I often thought, “this is the kind of deep dive book I want to write!”

4. What did you learn in the course of your research that surprised you the most?

Although I already knew it from lived experience as well as from other research, I continued (and still continue) to be surprised by the resilience and creative drive of each of these artists in the face of both internal and external challenges and stressors. This is what interests me so much: why do we feel so driven to keep creating even in the face of terrible trauma, even when the hopelessness of depression is so strong, even when we are anxiously affected by feedback on that creative work when we put it out into the world? 

There’s a partial answer in the therapeutic value of doing the work - we create because creating makes us feel better, it makes meaning where we need it, it gives us a voice when we feel like ours is lost. But that’s not fully true all of the time or at least not the total experience. If you’ve read books or even quotes by famous writers, for example, you know that most of them find the actual sitting down and writing to be a struggle. There are a lot of reasons for that but mental health is a big one. Sometimes doing the work makes things worse or at least doesn’t make things better. And yet we persist. Again and again. We create. 

And it continues to surprise me and amaze me and inspire me every time I explore the life of any artist who has created in the face of that.

(Personal aside: Kathryn’s observation that “we create because creating makes us feel better, it makes meaning where we need it, it gives us a voice when we feel like ours is lost” is one major reason I write. I often write reassuring words I need to hear, or describe techniques I use to feel better to remind myself that they work and I need to do them more often. Another reason is my desire to help others by writing about my mental health journey and the coping strategies that help me.)

5. How has the process of writing this book affected your own mental health and creativity?

I wrote this book during a very … interesting? … time of my life. I met the love of my life right at the same time I was just starting the pitch for this book. Three months later, pandemic lockdown happened. So we were in this interesting stage where we were just totally immersed in each other and falling in love and telling our stories of who we are to each other while not really seeing a lot of other people. This is always such a heady time and it adds an interesting twist to my passion for my work because talking about the research may always be exciting but when it’s combined with that falling in love experience of wanting to share everything you love with this new person it’s just … different.

But at the same time, there were other effects of the pandemic. I couldn’t get library books for a time, which limited my research. I read more material online than usual as a result. And that wasn’t particularly great for my mental health …

And then the pandemic delayed the publishing and there were changes in the editing stage that I had to process … and right as it finally became time to start telling people about the book because it was finally coming out, I found myself in a really bad bout of depression.

No matter how many times I go through this, it always takes me time to realize that’s what it is. I always think I’m lazy or in a slump or just tired … and this time it was all complicated by grief as my father became ill and passed away and pain/ lack of exercise as I dealt with a fractured ankle and financial overwhelm …

The point of which is all to say that I wasn’t remotely excited about sharing my work with anyone and I didn’t see the point of any of it, and it made it really hard to do that part of the job around this book. Until I realized it was depression, changed my meds, upped my self-care routine, and started feeling better. Then I was excited about the work again. Now, I’m doing this blog tour, and I’m so excited about the book.

So, I’m not sure that writing the book specifically impacted my mental health and creativity but my mental health impacted my creativity during the writing and early promotion of the book. And I will say that the aforementioned resilience of the artists I wrote about helped propel me forward even in those times when it was hard.

I think looking at each person’s body of work as a whole helped me to look at my own in the same way … that I’m creating a body of work, not a single book or a single piece … and there are going to be ebbs and flows of that related in part to my mental health, and if I take the long view, that’s all okay.

(Personal aside: I can definitely relate to Kathryn’s statement that no matter how many times she experiences bad bouts of depression, she doesn’t realize she’s in the midst of another one at first. She thinks she’s just lazy, or in a slump, or tired. The same is true for me. Even though I know - and teach others - that depression is not a personal weakness or character flaw, when I’m severely depressed I blame myself for not being more productive, motivated, etc. I also appreciate her wisdom about taking the long view and accepting that there will be ebbs and flows in my writing partly because of my mental health.)

6. What else would you like readers to know about you and your work?

I am deeply devoted to the full-time work of researching and writing about the intersection of art and mental health, not only because I find it interesting but also because I hope that things I share will be of value to other artists and creatives. I work 1:1 with artists who are interested in exploring how their own stressors impact their creativity and how they might want to work with that information to achieve their version of financial, creative, and holistic success. And I am in the early stages of consulting with galleries about how they can incorporate mental health awareness into exhibits for the benefit of artists, visitors and staff, without diluting the power or intention of the art.

I have made my living as a writer but in the past decade that’s increasingly meant churning out “content” at a pace meant for a machine, and I finally just stopped doing that a few years ago because it’s not sustainable, it’s not mentally healthy, and it doesn’t produce the most creative work. I switched to a patron-supported model, which is now fully on Substack. People who support my work do so because they believe in the importance of the research but also because they want to support slow, thoughtful, human-made creativity rather than consuming a specific product (supporting the writer not the specific book or essay.)

My goal is to find 1000 people who are interested in subscribing to this work at a rate of $100 per year. $100 per year feels like a lot. But it works out to less than $2 per week. Achieving the goal would show the world that we as creatives believe artists and writers can and should earn six figures. That said, I want to share what I’m learning with others and we’ve all got a budget so I also offer a Pay What You Can option here.

(Personal aside: Like Kathryn, I’ve realized I can’t churn out enough content to sustain myself if I get paid per article or based on the amount of time members spend reading the 150+ articles I’ve published on Medium. My ethical values also keep me from writing the kind of content many media outlets and their corporate owners and advertisers want. And independent media outlets that used to publish my investigative journalism articles are now struggling to survive. That’s why paid subscriptions from readers are so important. The more time writers are forced to spend doing other work just to pay basic living expenses, the less time we have to write.)

Thanks to Kathryn for answering my questions and writing The Artist’s Mind! When I finish reading it, I’ll post my review on Amazon.

This interview is part of a virtual book tour, which continues tomorrow at Loreteller's Compendium, where you can read an excerpt from the book that didn't make it into the final version.