ver wonder why some of the greatest artists across every form of art are remembered as deeply troubled people, constantly battling their own minds?

I have. And the reason I have is because I absolutely love their work. Vincent van Gogh, Sylvia Plath, Mitski: they all come from different time periods and artistic movements, yet they all carried a beautiful kind of suffering behind their work. And it’s absolutely captivating. I’m not saying that people don’t appreciate a good pop song about the beach or Claude Monet’s colourful Impressionist paintings depicting gardens and fields. But the “tortured artist” connects with the person on the other side on a completely different level.

Sadness is an incredibly powerful emotion, yet it’s one of the hardest to express. I’m not talking about crying. I’m talking about silent suffering, about dark thoughts quietly occupying the mind. Those things are not easy to put into words, nor are they easy to read on someone’s face.

So I think sadness creates great art because artists feel everything so deeply.

Art needs emotion. It needs passion. It needs every brushstroke, every piano note, every written sentence to capture a person’s exact state of mind. They experience emotions with such intensity that they somehow transform pain into something beautiful. The suffering becomes comforting. The pain becomes beautiful.

And so the circle continues. The tortured artist expresses those feelings through art, while the person on the other side (meaning the viewer or the watcher etc.), who may also be struggling or simply going through a difficult period, feels understood. Maybe they don’t even know how to describe what they’re feeling until they come across that painting, that poem, or that song. And that’s the beauty of art: being understood without having to explain yourself. That’s probably why the saddest art stays with us the longest. Happiness comforts us in the moment, but sadness tends to leave a mark. We don’t always remember the happiest song we’ve ever heard, but we almost always remember the one that made us stop and stare at the ceiling.

So why do we, as an audience, have this strange attraction to beautiful sadness?

Do we simply romanticise pain? Setting aside the first argument that explains how people relate deeply to another person’s inner suffering, whatever its cause may be, there’s another explanation that fascinates me even more. Psychology calls it the sadness paradox.

The sadness paradox describes our tendency to voluntarily seek out sad experiences through art. We willingly listen to heartbreaking songs, watch devastating films, and read books that we know will emotionally destroy us. Not because we enjoy suffering itself, but because there is something strangely comforting about experiencing sadness in a safe environment. We get to feel deeply without actually being in danger.

I experienced that while reading Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar. That book absolutely ruined me. I felt terrible for Esther and everything she went through. Yet, did I love the book? One hundred per cent.

The same happens every time I look at Van Gogh’s paintings. His life has almost become inseparable from his art. Whether we like it or not, he became the symbol of the “tortured artist.” And maybe that’s exactly why people keep returning to him. We don’t only admire the paintings; we admire the humanity behind them.

Sometimes, I even think people go looking for that feeling. They put on the saddest playlist they can find, rewatch the film that always makes them cry, or reread the book that broke them years ago. Not because they want to be miserable, but because sadness, when experienced through art, somehow makes us feel less alone.

Maybe that’s why we’ve romanticised the connection between suffering and creativity for centuries. Not because artists need pain in order to create something beautiful, but because pain often pushes people to express what happiness never asks them to. Great art doesn’t exist because sadness is superior to joy. It exists because sadness demands to be understood. And when that understanding reaches someone else, art has already done exactly what it was meant to do.