ABSTRACT
This chapter considers destructiveness and aggression not in the content of the work of art but rather in the process of its making. The artist has to find a way of getting herself into the work, and to do so she must break down or destroy whatever element of the outside world she is using as the subject of the developing artwork in order to recreate it as her own. She must also attack her medium ruthlessly to force it to be pliable enough to respond to her. And finally, she must be prepared to destroy the developing artwork itself, or some part of it, if it is not ‘working’ as a form for her experience. The chapter refers to the writing of psychoanalysts Marion Milner, Joyce McDougall, Michael Parsons, Joseph Sandler, Donald Winnicott and art critic Adrian Stokes. It includes quotations from interviews with artists Gina Glover, Dryden Goodwin, Deborah Padfield, Estelle Thompson, Sian Bonnell, and Thomson and Craighead.
