P03-359 - Composition in schizophrenic artistic expression

Abstract

The issue of composition in the artistic creativity of people suffering from schizophrenia has not been widely taken up by the researchers dealing with schizophrenic artistic expression. Those who wrote about the problems of composition mostly referred to familiar authors with schizophrenic disorders in the context of the course of their disease. The article aims to approach the issue of expression's psychopathology specifically dealing with the analysis of one element of the artistic work. Schizophrenic disorders provoke troubles with process of the arrangement, selection and information integration characteristic to specific thinking disorders of the delusional type. It is particularly visible in the composition of drawings and paintings.Most often one can encounter compositional presentations that have an open configuration based on symmetry which is predominantly figurative in nature, with ornamentation and decorative background. In the literature available in the Clinic of Psychiatry at the Medical Academy and Neuropsychiatric Hospital in Lublin there also prevail open figurative compositions based on symmetry with richer or poorer ornamentation. The issue of the composition's specificity in schizophrenic artistic expression is hard to judge objectively as most of the available works are shallow, schematic, open and without any depth or chiaroscuro. Difficulties in analyzing the compositional rules that are prevalent among people with those disorders are connected with the lack of objective methods, which could be helpful in working on that artistic material.