Dan Quixote

I’ve wrote something lately: about Nietzsche. Again… But it puzzles me and I’m not yet entirely satisfied. So I’ll entertain you (I hope so!) with a drawing – well, a graphic work – I used to do quite often in the years of my depression… 2000-2001… I have entitled it Dan Quixote because I always felt a bit like battling the windmills since I’ve become a full time artist… At the time, I was experimenting with composition and new graphic techniques; I’ll have to tell you one thing: depression has it’s bright side, paradoxically… If you are an artist, it could happen very well that your creativity – and productivity – increase very much, a lot, during depression. Well, not if you are catatonic (I never was)…but a bit of depression can stimulate the hell of your peripheral vision, can encourage you to explore roads you wouldn’t take otherwise… I’m not saying get depressed to get creative; I’m just saying, if this is the case and you ARE depressed, and this increase your creativity-productivity, why not take advantage of it? Even the worst situation MUST have some good sides… When somebody dies, someone else inherits… It’s sad, it’s cruel, maybe, but these are the facts of life (you can call it Wall Mart philosophy or such but it doesn’t make it less true… I remember reading an interview with Paul Schrader, the writer of Taxi Driver. When he wrote the screenplay made famous by Martin Scorsese and Robert de Niro, he was depressed au bout, comme disent les francophones…