depression & painting

I figure out why i get depressed in painting especially after I have been working and make a break through and get through or maybe I didn't get it but at least have some oddball inspiration

Let me defer to David Foster Wallace for prose :

“Schitt’s thrust, and his one great irresistible attraction in the eyes of Mario’s late father: The true opponent, the enfolding boundary, is the player himself. Always and only the self out there, on court, to be met, fought, brought to the table to hammer out terms. The competing boy on the net’s other side: he is not the foe: he is more the partner in the dance. He is the what is the word excuse or occasion for meeting the self. As you are his occasion. Tennis’s beauty’s infinite roots are self-competitive. You compete with your own limits to transcend the self in imagination and execution. Disappear inside the game; break through limits: transcend: improve: win. Which is why tennis is essentially a tragic enterprise, to improve and grow as a serious junior, with ambitions. You seek to vanquish and transcend the limited self whose limits make the game possible in the first place. It is tragic and sad and chaotic and lovely. All life is the same, as citizens of the human state: the animating limits are within, to be killed and mourned, over and over again.” (84 Infinite Jest)

Tennis here is just like painting. It is an activity that requires deep concentration and has a multiplicity of non-predictable results.  And the end-result is always tragic because in painting like Tennis "You seek to vanquish and transcend the limited self whose limits make the game possible in the first place." After you make a break through in paint you have redefined yourself and how you conduct yourself in the world and you are deeply consumed by the loss by the inability to find oneself. And this action does not necessarily happen upon the completion of a painting but actually in the process. anytime in the process. It is possible to feel oneself transcended and destroyed and expanded. It is lovely and marvelous and growing experience but also tragic because inevitably a part of oneself dies. 

I know this will not be comforting to me the next time I fall in a rut but I realized that the depression is wholly a part of the process that to paint is the mean that you have to be brave enough to confront the loss of self. You have to be willing to kill yourself to paint. And you actually have to kill yourself to paint. You have to have the desire to die. And the only hope and respite is the hope that you may be reborn. (that was terribly christian or religious) But is deeply true. It is tragic in the oedipal nature of self discovery. It is true because it us becoming and re-becoming and recognizing that this becoming is a fundamental aspect of life. I will be depressed again. I will feel the unbelievable sadness. I will feel the weight. But I must be brave. I must be responsible for what I do. For who I am. For what I have done. and what I will do.
Sharon Horvath made it clear in senior seminar that depression was a part of this. Getting sad and stopping is all a part of this process.