Art & Creativity Quote by Timothy Findley

Art usually gets credited with comfort because it distracts or redeems. Findley’s line lands harder: the painting soothes precisely because it does not argue him out of dread. It “verified his fears” - a verb from paperwork and audits, not poetry. The comfort is bureaucratic, almost clinical: your panic has been stamped legitimate. That’s the first twist. The second is stranger: the same image that confirms fear also teaches that fear is “wonderful,” not in a self-help way, but in the older sense of wonder as awe, vertigo, confrontation with the sublime.

Findley, as a novelist, is working the psychological hinge between terror and fascination. The painting becomes a private accomplice, telling him he isn’t hallucinating the darkness in the world; he’s perceiving it. That validation is soothing because it ends the loneliness of being afraid. Fear, in this frame, is not a defect to be cured but an instrument of attention - a heightened sensor for what matters, what threatens, what is sacred enough to risk loss.

The subtext is an argument against narratives of courage that treat fear as an enemy. Findley suggests fear can be aesthetically and ethically instructive: it sharpens perception, deepens feeling, gives shape to the unspeakable. A painting can do that because it holds dread still long enough to be contemplated. It turns panic into an object with edges, light, composition - and in doing so, it makes fear livable, even intoxicating.