Art & Creativity Quote by Abbey Lincoln

Lincoln’s line is a clean piece of self-mythology: the artist as her own medicine. It’s funny in its bluntness, but it’s not anti-therapy so much as a refusal of being pathologized. “I don’t have to” lands like a boundary, a quiet rebuke to a culture that tries to turn every ache into a diagnosis and every person into a patient. She’s staking out a different kind of care, one that doesn’t depend on permission, money, or a clinical gatekeeper.

The subtext is about control. A therapist’s couch implies confession on someone else’s schedule, in someone else’s language. Paint brushes are private, immediate, and sovereign: you decide what comes out, how ugly it gets, whether it stays. That matters for a Black woman artist who spent her life navigating rooms where her emotions were either ignored or used against her. Art becomes both witness and weapon - a space where she can tell the truth without being corrected.

Context sharpens it further: Lincoln came up in an era when “serious” art and “serious” healing were often coded as white and institutional, while Black creative expression was treated as entertainment, not inquiry. By calling her brushes her therapist, she flips the hierarchy. The studio isn’t an escape from reality; it’s a method for metabolizing it. The line also sneaks in a practical argument: creativity isn’t just output, it’s maintenance. For Lincoln, making things isn’t a hobby. It’s how she stays intact.