5 Artists Who Created Work While Recuperating From Illness or Injury

Health and illness are recurring themes in the history of art—they’ve been portrayed in a multitude of ways over the centuries, and across many media. But the issue of physical wellbeing, and the challenges that can exist in relation to it, have influenced the development of art in other ways too: There are many notable artists who created work during periods when they were recovering from an illness or injury of their own. Here’s a chronological look at a few artists who made some of their work under these kinds of difficult circumstances.

Vincent van Gogh
Claude Monet
Frida Kahlo
Henri Matisse
Henry Fraser

Vincent van Gogh

Vincent van Gogh had many mental health issues that caused him great distress during his life. In 1888, his struggles led him to cut off his left ear, and he was subsequently hospitalized. After his injury, he painted self-portraits showing himself with the bandages around his ear, including Self Portrait with Bandaged Ear, created only a week after he left the hospital in January 1889. He also painted works in this period that didn’t directly portray his health concerns, including Still Life with a Plate of Onions. Van Gogh continued to create art as he dealt with mental health struggles in his life.

Claude Monet

Later in life, Claude Monet began to experience problems with his vision as a consequence of developing cataracts (a common issue with aging) and it affected his ability to see colors. A comparison of paintings he made of a Japanese footbridge in the garden of his home in Giverny—one in 1899 before he developed cataracts, and one in 1922 while coping with their effects—illustrate how the condition affected his technique. In 1923, he had a two-stage operation to remove the cataract in his right eye; a photo taken afterward shows him with dark shades covering his eyes while he was recuperating.

Monet wasn’t satisfied with all aspects of the operation’s outcome (“It is to my great chagrin that I regret having had this fatal operation. Pardon me for speaking so frankly and let me tell you that it is criminal to have put me in this situation,” he wrote to his ophthalmologist after a third procedure was necessary). He eventually became comfortable enough to return to work. The use of color in his work after the operation has more in common with his work prior to 1914, which indicates that the procedure did make a notable difference to his ability to see and accurately render colors on his canvases.

Frida Kahlo

A century ago, Frida Kahlo had an accident that would change the course of her life, both physically and creatively. On September 17, 1925, 18-year-old Kahlo was traveling on a bus that collided with a streetcar. The accident killed a number of passengers; Kahlo suffered serious injuries, including fractures of her spine that would require 30 operations over her lifetime. While recuperating from the accident (she had to wear a full-body cast for a few months), she began painting, which helped shift her interest from one day studying medicine to making art. Many of her later works also explore issues of health and disability—and some, like the 1929 painting The Bus, have a connection to the accident itself.

Henri Matisse

In 1941, Henri Matisse was diagnosed with duodenal cancer and had an operation to try and fix the problem. Though he would live for another 13 years, in the aftermath, of the operation, he experienced a number of complications that almost killed him. Matisse was severely weakened, and when he had no strength to stand, he would “paint with scissors” from his bed or a wheelchair, ultimately creating his well-known cut-outs series.

Matisse used a pair of scissors to cut shapes from colored paper, which he then arranged using pins to form new images. On some occasions, he pasted the shapes together to create artworks on a much larger scale—Large Decoration with Masks (1953), for example, is more than 32 feet wide. One of his most famous cut-outs is The Swimming Pool (1952), in which the cut-out paper designs were pinned across the walls of his apartment to create the illusion of bathers in a pool. He also devised a number of practical methods to create his art with limited mobility, including drawing on a wall using a bamboo pole, as portrayed in a famous photograph by the photographer Robert Capa.

Henry Fraser

A contemporary example of an artist who has created their work in the aftermath of a serious injury, is the painter Henry Fraser. Fraser had originally planned to try to make it as a rugby player, but life changed drastically for him after he was paralyzed from the neck down following a swimming accident in 2009. Fraser had always loved art, and it became a positive focus and a skill he developed after he discovered in 2015 that he was able to create drawings and paintings by holding tools in his mouth. Fraser has created a number of works this way—you can buy them on his website. “Without my accident I never would have found that love I had as a kid,” he wrote. “The setting in the work is full of innovation and possibility. Adversity has given me a gift.”

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