Bad artists mine. They excavate their life's experiences, go mining for more, seek experiences solely for the sake of turning around and spitting them out. Far worse, once they've exhausted their own landscape of experiences, left pitted and scarred, they'll turn to mining others. Those sorts of people are exhausting to be around, and rightly called toxic.
Not to say that art doesn't require a little digging into yourself. But it's a gentle excavation, like building a well. You find the right spot, you create the awareness, the opportunities, and then you let the runoff of life fill you up, be it a sudden storm or seeping groundwater. And then you take all those experiences and you draw from them.
True expression comes from being overfull of life, and not from hollowing yourself out. You should never have to try and find something to say, the struggle is and should be how to say it.
Artists, I think at their core, are people who are struggling to communicate. It's why they spend so much of their energy and time trying to find the right ways to make something that makes it so people can understand. Be it drawing or dancing or acting or writing, we're all trying say something along the lines of "This is what I think, this is how I feel."
Sometimes what we think is quite complicated, sometimes what we feel is a lot, but getting it out of your well and giving it to someone else, to hold, to consider (even for a passing moment), that is truly something.
And I think that is art.