I have been feeling pretty miserable the last few days. I have just pulled up the masters for a concert film I produced for the late Daniel Johnston in 2007/8. The reason the concert film happened was because a few months before I had seen Jeff Feuerzeig’s documentary ‘The Devil and Daniel Johnston’ on TV. I had heard of Daniel before (I think I heard David Bowie mention him in an interview) but I did not really know about him. The documentary uses a large archive of film, video and art material alongside his music to illustrate his life, and in particular his decline into severe mental illness. When I saw it I thought it was a good film, but it is incredibly miserable, particularly when looking at Daniel’s life as he was at the time it was shot around 2005. I decided I wanted to do something really positive showing that Daniel was still capable of great things, and I managed to work out some deals and go and film a concert that turned out to be one of his legendary performances.
At the time I was so motivated to get across Daniel’s art ahead of the illness. It struck me today that my wife, who is a incredible songwriter, was surrounded by people who were praising her for her music, and I was the one having to deal with the reality behind the scenes. I did still get to enjoy her ability, and I always tried to keep my appreciation of her music, but you also have that to deal with the downsides, and the neuroticism. I guess I did support my wife’s music and try and keep it separate from the illness (where it was not the subject of the music).
But I was just thinking how we used to talk about how it is almost like there are two kinds of schizophrenia sufferer. There are the ones that seem to not do very much, and there are those like my wife who have just masses of creativity. It must play a role somehow. It can not be coincidence. My wife has a friend she met in a hospital. Her father was a notable smart person. This girl was an incredible artist. We called her once for a video chat, and I looked over her shoulder and I said “have you painted Guernica on your apartment wall?” and she just nodded and said “yes”. It was like a full size replica. She also was able to perfectly replicate a very regional and slight accent from somewhere in the UK that she had visited.
I often think these things come out of a dedication to attention to detail and craft motivated by some kind of deep pain that probably correlates with the condition. But, I would like to share one of the performances Daniel Johnston did on that concert that night, the beautiful song “Go”. I think he did it the best he had ever done it that night, accompanied with an arrangement worked out by James Yorkstone and Adem Ilhan, who were brilliant and sensitive accompanist for Daniel in the first part of his set. It is such a beautiful song, written by a man that could see things that many would miss.
Please add other art to this thread if you can think of any. Let’s have a positive thread to celebrate the art of these incredibly observant and creative people.
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Thank you for your observant post about other artists, and also about your wife and her friend. Great art is such a contribution to society, and doing art in general is like the soul is touching something extraordinary: creativity.
My daughter did art (painting in real life, and using the Paint program on her computer) prior to her illness starting up. She was self taught and really enjoyed it. However, her illness seems to have robbed her of her desire to create, which I am sorry for. I love her art and there are still many of her pictures around my home. She was the most creative soul in our family.
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Let’s remember Syd Barrett, a founding member of Pink Floyd and the original creative force behind the band.
He went away on a “long weekend” and he came back a completely changed man. He did LSD and sadly he suffered from schizophrenia for the rest of his short life after that. He ended up being fired from the band for being completely unreliable (this was when the band was starting to get a lot of attention and Barrett was the member the press wanted to talk to). He was unrecognizable after just a few short years.
A lot of Pink Floyd’s songs were about Barrett. His story is the story of talent that was essentially destroyed by his schizophrenia, along with all his ambition. It’s easy for me to understand because his story strikes very close to home - the sudden onset of the illness and personality change, and the complete destruction of ambition.
There’s been much speculation of retrospective schizophrenia diagnoses of cubist and fauvist artists, but most of this has been debunked as unsupported by facts. The notion being that abstraction and false colors and auras are the stuff of schizophrenic symptoms and cognition. Van Gogh technically predated fauvism, and while he certainly had mental health or neurological issues, there’s no true consensus on a diagnosis.
One exception is the English Artist Louis Wain who was eventually diagnosed with schizophrenia. He’s famous for obsessively painting cats in increasingly kaleidoscopic colors and abstractions presumably as his symptoms became more acute. Early psychiatrists latched on to the progression of his artwork as theoretically indicative of the illness and its progression which fueled much of the debunked retrospective diagnosis of other cubist and fauvist artists. Like van Gogh, some disagree that schizophrenia played a role in his art, citing ASD (autism spectrum disorder) or other neurodiversities.
I’m a bit uneasy with placing too much emphasis on the role of serious mental illness with creative “genius” or fame, as I feel it can fetishize our condition and place unreasonable and unrealistic expectations of recovery in the diagnosed, caregivers and public alike. I also feel there’s a chicken and egg or possible misattribution aspect to this narrative. I was notable gifted and creative in youth and during my prodrome, but struggled considerably to realize and live up to my potentials once I became ill. It feels more that I realized some of my creative gifts in adulthood in spite of my illness, not because of it.
That said, my recovery is the product of Jungian analysis and modern psychiatry. And Jung’s theory was that the unconscious drives creativity and that psychoses and other psychological complexes had the benefit of increasing the permeability of the “membrane” between unconscious and conscious thought.
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