what have been, if any, your experiences with depression & its effects upon your art? does it handicap or inspire? how do you cope? how do you fail to cope? what do you think brings on the depression?, etc.

i will post my own experiences, but i want to see what others have to say first, just because i want to shape the thread as little as possible.

Then again I have had a number of people tell me that my artwork has been at its best when i have suffered greatly from depression.

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ok, so here goes nothing. jack johnson plucks slow guitar strings while my heart sinks. the whole world is asleep besides me. i feel like the odd man out, a very odd man, i choose to be left out. i sleep too late, stay up too late, smoke too much. when i drink i get too drunk, when i read i'm lost in what i'm reading, when i create, i cease to exist.

i can't have just one girl, i have to have three. it's not even for sex, i need that many to keep up with me mentally. one for the stupid sh*t, the laughs and the reanimated childhood, one for the deep talks on the phone for four hours, one unattainable to keep my ego in check...actually, to keep me depressed. what fun would life be if i weren't in a funk? if i didn't garner the fuel to keep writing this junk.

things i should do plague me. it's 9:20, class starts in 5 minutes, shouldn't i get up? shouldn't i have gotten up 10 minutes ago? shouldn't i have gone to bed at 12 instead of 5am? shouldn't i have stayed home from the bar, stayed with my woman instead of riding around in the other girl's car looking for lost stars inside us? shouldn't i have slit my wrists when i was 15 and had the chance, had the recklessness and the abandon? shouldn't i have jumped...when i was 13? swam a bit further out so i couldn't swim back at age 10? shouldn't i just do it now?

there's no reason for all this. i have a pretty good life, i've come to terms with most of my demons, killed a few of them and made peace with the rest. but...there's always something. it's the one drop of cyanide that taints the entire water supply. it's that thing that in my happiest hour reminds me that it'll get worse...maybe it's the same thing that in my darkest hour lets me know that the best is yet to come. i dunno, it's kinda dumb. but sometimes i slip, and the world is against me again, they all want to isolate me and my only weapon is the pen.

i guess it's probably chemical...sorta like my roomate, except he has all sorts of chemicals to counteract his imbalance. me, i try to subjugate the rage and the sadness and the hopeless, masochistic self-chastising with will-power. with the passing of each hour i grow more tired, but i won't sleep. i will never sleep. i will never get up, get showered, get out to buy groceries, get out to breathe real oxygen, get out to interact and possibly save myself.

THIS IS A SUICIDE LETTER. but don't panic, i've been writing it for 22 years. i'll probably write it for 22 more, then 22 more after that. i'll probably die happy, old, with kids and grandkids who love and look up to me and will probably never know about the 7 circles of heaven and hell that wage war within me. so rest easy, i'll be here for a while. i'll just sit back and suffer being insane with my cigarrettes, girls and a smile.

as for needing 3 girls to keep you happy, i think thats pretty funny and also pretty silly. maybe you need to find some more multi-dimensional people. i know that personally i can laugh and be stupid, and have deep conversations, and i'm also unattainable. =)

anyways, i'm also obviously just another little jesus freak, perhaps a little sheltered, but not as sheltered as some might think. and it might seem that i went off on a little sermon, but i find it impossible to express what God has done in my life. but its the answer to the questions i keep seeing all around me, everyday.

i'm still wondering how to express all this in my artwork, but until i find my inspiration i'm kept busy with making pots and sculptures and other fun stuff. another thing i've noticed - it might be be the art that makes one crazy, because i know i've gotten a lot weirder since i've started taking serious art classes... i think it has something to do with all the sleep deprivation. but let me know what you think, even if you think i'm full of crap. =)

better watch out, the admin's banned religion & politics from the forums! lol...that's a ridiculous move in an art forum, as i've told him in an email. he didn't seem to read what i wrote tho, judging from his reply (i'll post both later).

to tell you the truth andi, 22 years of being the son of baptist missionaries has more than introduced me to this philosophy. in truth, it's probably numbed me to the message a bit. there are several reasons why i don't agree with it, but it wouldn't do either of us any good to have me rant about them here, and it would probably be kind of annoying to the others. i can email you about it if you want to talk about that tho.

i think some people will critisize you for stating your religious beliefs in here, since evangelic christianity isn't very popular these days. but you stated that you also are often depressed, and you have stated how you get through it, as i've asked, and i believe that is a valid response and your input would have been crippled without it.

the thing about three girls is artistic liscence at work...an exageration of the actual situation.

i don't think that most of the great artists do kill themselves. van gogh, pollock, basquiat & rothko are the only ones i can think of off the top of my head. a lot of the other greats died of old age, disease, or thru no fault of their own. this has been mentioned in here at some point, i believe...maybe by kim? it's what people want to believe because they want the idea that artists are crazy, self-destructive forces that blow big through life & die young.

well, i'll get back to the how-it-affects-my-work thing later, i need to think about it a bit more.

as for the artist being a stereotypical manic-depressive, i agree that not as many artists as most people think have killed themselves - in fact all the ones you listed were the ones i was thinking of. i have a professor who likes to enthrall us all with mulptiple tellings of rothko's bloody end, and i watched that basquiat film not too long ago, so thats probably why i've become more aware of these trends of depression and substance abuse in artists.

but it does make me sad to wonder what more van gogh could have done if he had painted for many more years...

"This is a book about the way art gets made, the reasons it often doesn't get made, and about the difficulties that cause so many artists to give up along the way. David Bayles and I are both working artists, grappling daily with the problems of making art in the real world. The observations we make are drawn from personal experience, and relate more to the needs of fellow artists than to the interests of viewers.

Do not mistake Art & Fear for a pop psychology self-help book -- we're not interested in freeing your inner child! This is a book about what it feels like to sit down at your potter's wheel or keyboard, easel or camera, trying to do the work you need to do. Simply put, you have a choice between giving your art your best shot and risking that it will not make you happy, or not giving it your best shot and thereby guaranteeing that it will not make you happy. What we have tried to do is illuminate the obstacles you face, and offer some artistic strategies for getting past them".

The idea of personality traits being associated with creative jobs is still strong today. Rap artists are hardened street wise thugs. Physicits have the stereo type of being eccentric absent minded proffessors. Artists are shown to be depressive, isolated, eccentric, and passionate.

What I think is interesting is that as artists, our stereotype seems to bear a lot of truth. Many of my friends at school embody these characteristics and many of them sufffer from various forms of depression. I have been hospitalized for depression myself.

From my own personal experiences, I think that depression brings a certain need for introspection. To deal with depression we have to spend a lot of time and energy looking at ourselves, looking at the events and circumstances in our lives, and looking at the other people around us. If you do not learn these skills for yourself then depression will kill you.

But the kicker is this: All of the soul searching and observation and questioning takes you on a bit of journey, at the end of which, you will have a story to tell. These stories and ideas we find like this are incredible things to express. And the skills we develop with our depression gives us the ability to express them in more complex ways than "Hey man, my girl friend dumped me... f*$&%ing b*$^@"

In my opinon, artists don't get depressed. The depressed become artists. (obviously there's a lot of room in my theory for exceptions)

I had an art history prof who linked this theory all the way up to batman.