What makes you jealous?

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Here’s one such shortcut, and it comes from my first-ever art teacher, the fine artist Sheffy Tattarath, who told this to me when we met in his art studio in Muscat in 2022, after a gap of more than a decade. I’d shown him a few of my sketches and art experiments from the years prior, and I was unsure at the time of where to take it from there, and how to build them up into something substantial.

“What makes you jealous?” he asked me, quite simply. “What kind of works (of art, or otherwise), do you feel the most jealous of, when you see it? That’s what you should make!”

 
Sheffy uncle (as my younger brother and I fondly call him), an accomplished painter well-known for his realistic portraits and landscapes rendered exquisitely in oils, watercolours, pencils, pastels, and pen and ink, had initially touched upon this topic of what makes one jealous in the context of his own paintings. While he was so prolific in the realist school of art, he told me that he actually wished to be a more expressionistic artist, to be able to create paintings and images straight out of his mind’s eye, from his imagination, without being held down so strongly by the reference image or subject 1 — and to that end, he was quite jealous of abstract artists!

 

Sheffy Tattarath on his 2024 interview by The Arabian Stories

Wadi Tiwi, Oman. Pen and ink wash by Sheffy Tattarath, 2006

In any case, Sheffy uncle’s advice was pretty generative for me. One evening about a month after our meeting, I sat down, racked my memory a bit, and wrote down a list of works (and kinds of works) that, when I’d experienced, read, or saw them, I did feel jealous that I wasn’t able to do something like that myself — and on a more productive note, wished I could do just as well, if not better! It gave me a better-defined orientation towards my own artistic sensibilities that I wouldn’t have had uncovered otherwise.

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Julia Cameron touches on another aspect of jealousy (pertaining to other people, and not to creating particular kinds of work) in one section in her book The Artist’s Way 2 , where she talks of jealousy being ‘a map’, and using it as a way to know what action to take.

“I have long regarded jealousy as my greatest weakness,” she writes. “Only recently have I seen it for the tough-love friend that it is.”

“Jealousy is a map. Each of our jealousy maps differs. (..). I, for example, (..) took an unhealthy interest in the fortunes and misfortunes of women playwrights. I was their harshest critic, until I wrote my first play.

“With that action, my jealousy vanished, replaced by a feeling of camaraderie. My jealousy had actually been a mask for my fear of doing something that I really wanted to do, but was not yet brave enough to take action toward.”

 

The Jealousy Map, an exercise from Week 7 in The Artist’s Way

Cameron follows up this passage with an exercise, ‘The Jealousy Map’ —
This map is made of three columns:

• ‘In the first column, name those whom you are jealous of.’ (WHO)
• ‘Next to each name, write why. Be as specific and accurate as you can.’ (WHY)
• ‘In the third column, list one action you can take to move toward creative risk and out of jealousy.’ (ACTION ANTIDOTE)

 
Cameron ends the section by encouraging the reader to harness jealousy’s fierce energy as creative fuel.

 

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So, jealousy — a feeling that could potentially point you towards what you should be making, doing, or acting upon.

 
I do want to mention that what’s important here is to pay attention to certain recurring things, works, or people that, when they do pop up, make you jealous. Track the emotion over time, on your way to sniffing out your true North — that’s how it helped me, anyway.

It’s an ugly feeling, isn’t it? And yet it’s one I reckon everybody has had a universal recognition of… which could be why this piece of advice resonated with me in the first place. At the same time, I think it’s a feeling that should be acknowledged, examined, and transformed within the individual when it does crop up, rather than being squelched down or brushed under the carpet.

The trap, I feel, is getting too caught up in the heaviness of it — not to mention that it’s a feeling that can be stoked, triggered, or conditioned externally and unconsciously (for instance, are we socially engineered to feel jealous of certain things, and certain things only?)

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Anyhow, with that piece of advice from Sheffy uncle, and the exercise from the Artist’s Way, I’ll wrap up this post with a warning from the mythic-psychological world about taking jealousy too far, and of not working with it ~

 

Envy. Engraving by John Goddard, c.1640

Strictly speaking, in the psychoanalytical world, there is a distinction made between jealousy and envy — but in Sheffy’s and Julia’s words above, I feel their use of the term ‘jealousy’ maps well to ’envy’ in this context, perhaps a lighter tint of it.

 
In heavier doses, “envy does not spoil the person who one envies, but it spoils one’s own capacity for pleasure. It truly is a deadly sin,” says the astrologer Liz Greene in a webinar on the planetary symbolism of Saturn 3 . In Goddard’s engraving above that Greene presented in the webinar, we see the envious person carrying two snakes: one attempting to strike the person who is envied, and the other about to strike and poison the envious person himself, ’…which gives him no rest’, concludes the poem below the engraving. (Notice that Julia Cameron also referred to jealousy as a snakebite). Greene continues: “Envy really evades one’s ability for enjoyment. When you are envious, you cannot enjoy another person’s gift, or your own, for that matter”.

There’s also another image of Envy, a fresco by Giotto di Bobdone from 1306 on the Seven Vices, where the lone, central figure who takes up the bulk of the painting has a serpent coming out his mouth, in place of his tongue, and the serpent coils back around to bite the person in his eye. You get the idea.

 
And yet, Greene says we must pay attention to when this happens, because the impluse stems from somewhere deeply unconscious within us. “We wouldn’t envy something if it weren’t deeply meaningful to our own souls. And the moment that we start looking at this issue of What is it that I feel I lack, that someone else has got?, it only matters if the potential was there for it somewhere within us as well. Otherwise we would just look at the other person and go, ‘yes, yes, very nice’, and move on. And the fact that somebody triggers envy means that they are triggering a deep knowledge that this is something we need to develop, that we need to work with this. We might never be able to produce it in the same form as the envied person has — but it’s got to be developed. It’s got to be one’s own form. Envy tells us what we value most.”