>>11726This is interesting. I made my favorite art back when I was crushingly lonely. I wouldn’t create a lot (depression) but I would have spurts where I couldn’t stop, and I made interesting stuff.
I don’t believe depression can make you a good artist, but it’s naive to say some people don’t find inspiration in it. If you have that uncontrollable drive to create art, it will come out in that. I did AP art with two other people. One of them was obviously mentally struggling (I picked her up when she ran away after a suicide attempt kind of struggling), but she never thought about her pain and so I don’t think she could conceptualize it enough to put it into art. The other just was an uber normie who couldn’t accept she was a normie, so tried to be edgy instead of just being herself. She made her entire portfolio about surface level pinterest stuff (like literally stole the ideas from pinterest). Mine was on isolation. IK I’m biased but the mentally ill girl and I’s portfolios were a lot more interesting … and I believe this is simply because we’d thought & experienced emotions in a different way. Sigh. I don’t want to believe depression makes better art .. but it can absolutely have an influence if you know how to wield it. There’s a reason all the best creative geniuses are crazy.