Art and Grief: How Creativity Holds What Words Cannot

By Simon Kenny | 7 min read

I have stood in front of paintings and felt my throat close before I understood why. Grief does that. It arrives without language, and it quietly takes our language with it. Over more than twenty years in the studio I have come to see art and grief as old companions, and to trust that a canvas can carry a weight the spoken word simply drops.

Art and grief are bound together because loss quietens the parts of the brain built for speech. When words fail, making or looking at art gives sorrow a form to inhabit. The work holds what cannot be said, letting the grieving mind move between facing the pain and resting from it, slowly turning raw loss into meaning.

Here I want to look at what happens in the brain when we mourn, how the act of making steadies us, how a handful of artists turned unbearable loss into work that still speaks, and why abstraction, my own language, so often reaches people at the very edge of words.

What happens in the brain when we grieve?

Grief is a neurological event, not only an emotional one. When we lose someone, the brain reads the loss as a threat to survival and reacts accordingly. Imaging studies show the amygdala, our threat detector, becomes hyperactive, while the prefrontal cortex, the seat of planning and clear speech, is heavily taxed. The result is the fog so many mourners describe: lost keys, broken concentration, sentences that will not form.

Researchers who study what happens in the brain when we experience art find that powerful images are handled through emotional and social pathways rather than purely logical ones. A colour or a shape can land when a paragraph cannot. Making art seems to slip past the overwhelmed, verbal front of the brain and reach the feeling centres directly, releasing emotion that has no words attached to it. I have watched people weep in front of a canvas and then admit, quite honestly, that they could not say what they were weeping about. Their brain knew something their language could not reach.

How does making art help us process loss?

Making art helps because it lets us grieve in doses. According to psychologists Margaret Stroebe and Henk Schut, whose Dual Process Model of grief appeared in 1999, healthy mourning swings back and forth between confronting the loss and stepping away to attend to ordinary life. We cannot stare into the pain without pause, and we cannot heal by avoiding it altogether. The studio holds both movements at once.

Choosing a colour and remembering a person pulls me toward the loss; mixing the paint, judging the balance, working the surface pulls me back into the practical present. The pendulum that grief demands is built into the very act of painting. Research into emotion regulation through drawing supports this, finding that free expression and deliberate distraction each shift mood in their own way, and that the healthiest practice draws on both. I explore more of this in my writing on the psychology and emotion of abstract art.

There is an older idea that says the same thing more beautifully. In the Japanese craft of kintsugi, a broken bowl is repaired with gold lacquer so the cracks become the most treasured part of the object. Psychologists Richard Tedeschi and Lawrence Calhoun gave this a clinical name, post-traumatic growth, describing how many people do not merely recover from loss but are reshaped by it, often with a surge of creativity. The finished work becomes the gold within the seam.

Which artists turned their grief into something lasting?

Some of the most moving works in art were built to hold a single, specific loss. When Käthe Kollwitz lost her eighteen-year-old son Peter in the first weeks of the First World War, she spent eighteen years struggling to memorialise him. The sculpture she finally completed in 1932, The Grieving Parents, still kneels over his grave in Belgium. The mother and father kneel apart, not touching, and that small gap between them says a great deal about how solitary mourning can be even when it is shared.

Mark Rothko worked at the opposite scale. He insisted his enormous fields of colour were never about colour but about human tragedy, and the chapel of dark canvases he made in Houston has left thousands of visitors in tears before what is, in plain terms, purple paint. His work in the tradition of Abstract Expressionism shows how pure colour and scale can open a space for feeling that a figurative picture sometimes closes down.

Felix Gonzalez-Torres found a quieter form. His portrait of his partner Ross, lost to AIDS, is a pile of sweets weighing exactly what Ross weighed when he was well. Visitors take a piece and eat it, the pile shrinks like a wasting body, and the gallery refills it endlessly so that Ross is both consumed and continually restored. Each of these artists gave grief a form or a body it could live in, whether granite, colour or sugar.

Why does abstraction speak when words fail?

Abstraction reaches the grieving because it asks for the right kind of attention. A recognisable scene invites us to name things, and naming is exactly what the mourning brain struggles to do. A field of colour, a torn edge, an area of bare canvas asks only that we feel our way through it. In over twenty years as an abstract painter I have learned to trust empty space as much as the marks.

The unpainted area in a work is rarely nothing. It often carries the presence of an absence, the shape of someone no longer in the room, and it leaves the viewer room to place their own memory there. When I use colour to carry grief I am not illustrating sadness so much as building a container a stranger can pour their own sorrow into. That, for me, is the strange generosity of abstraction: a form open enough to hold a loss I will never know the details of, yet specific enough to feel true.

Frequently Asked Questions

Can making art really help with grief?

Yes. Making art engages emotional and sensory parts of the brain that stay active when language falters, letting mourners express and steady feeling without needing the right words. It works best alongside support from loved ones and professionals, not in place of it.

Why does abstract art move people who are grieving?

Abstract art does not ask viewers to name what they see. Its colours, textures and empty spaces give the grieving mind room to project memory and feeling, reaching emotions that realistic images or words can sometimes miss.

What is the Dual Process Model of grief?

Proposed by Margaret Stroebe and Henk Schut in 1999, it describes healthy grieving as an oscillation between confronting loss and taking restorative breaks from it. Creative work naturally supports both movements.

Do I need to be an artist to use art for grief?

No. The benefit comes from the act of making or attentive looking, not from skill. Simple, private mark-making can steady difficult feelings, and spending time with art that moves you offers many of the same effects.

Art and grief: a closing thought

Grief is a gravity we cannot argue with, and it will always outrun our vocabulary. What art offers is a way to carry it that does not depend on words. Whether you are making marks in private or standing quietly in front of a canvas, you are giving sorrow a form, and a form can be held, set down and returned to. For me, that is the deepest work a painting can do. If any of this speaks to you, I would gently invite you to spend time with my collection of original abstract paintings and notice what comes to the surface. To talk about a commission that carries a particular feeling or memory, please get in touch.