“Art is all the Feelings Trapped Inside”: An Interview with Marilyn McKeon

Abstract

This article is based on an interview with untrained artist Marilyn McKeon about her creative development, motivation, and process. It attempts to relate both her personal understanding of why she makes artwork and her experience of how she makes artwork in her own voice. Ms. McKeon's description of her use of artmaking for self-expression, self-understanding, and self-healing suggests that her creative process is motivated by a natural striving for mental wellness. This conclusion is consonant with the viewpoint of Hans Prinzhorn (1972), who amassed a huge collection of spontaneous artworks by untrained people in European mental hospitals. Prinzhorn theorized that the creative process is based on fundamental esthetic instincts common to all, contradicting the popular association of spontaneous art-making with mental illness. It is also consistent with the phenomenon of so-called “Outsider Art” by people who live or work outside the mainstream of contemporary culture and who produce art in response to “inner necessity” rather than conforming to the changing styles and movements of contemporary culture (MacGregor, 1989).