This is not a good way to transition from being a fly on the wall when it comes to social media interaction to actively posting on sites I've had accounts on for years but here I go...when I return to a piece of media every so often I tend to gain a new analysis of that media that strays further from general consensus and JTHM has a interesting one I dont think has been brought up.(this has nothing to do with the anon situation dont worry although mental health is a main topic)
And that is how mental health affects your capacity to create art and your mark in art history. Devi's and johnny's styles and relationship to their art vary wildly but they both cleanly fit into the two main boxes I and many others most likely place different types of art into, art made for consumption and art showing the artists mental decline that people that never shut up about how "scary" it is.
Artists that fit into nny's category are obvious; Bryan Charnly, Bryan lewis Saunders, Louis Wain, van gogh, ect. artists that gained their fame and place in a art museum because of the way they portrayed their mental struggles through their art, something unique that disturbed the calm natured and made people feel the way art from the same era didn't after that artist was already dead or to far gone.
Devi's art is everybody else's, especially artists that have art getting spread around for commission, comic artists, film makers, wood workers,people that sell their knitting and crochet, storytime animators, most digital art in general. Art that you are constantly exposed to and will likely be ignored by historians, there's nothing wrong with this side of the art community but it obvious to everyone that anything after the era where photography became a thing your art will mean nothing if it doesn't start a movement, disturb people, or isn't already in a museum.
Now everyone's mental health always changes their art at some level no matter how neurodivergent or neurotypical you are, art is an extension of the self you can never truly separate the art from the artist. With a keen enough eye you can tell what and when an artist was struggling with something when the art was created, even subconsciously. Let's use music as a example; daddy, by Korn, and Tag your it by Melanie Martinez. Both songs are about sexual assault but if you asked someone who never heard either what one was made by the person who was raped repeatedly as a child and what one was made by the person with a fetish for it every person you asked would know.
When this comes to JTHM which is also a story about art block as well as edgy teenage rambling...johnny's and devi's relationship dynamic mimic it nearly perfectly. Nny is a (giving him the most "basic" mental diagnosis i can here for simplicitys sake) Schizoaffective bipolar type with no hope of getting to a stable state and devi is neurotypical with a support system and practically no mental struggles whatsoever, she handles the trauma of watching romantic interests die/get extremely injured and nearly getting killed by nny disturbingly well when not accounting for when Jimmy was stalking her. Art is her only outlet but she isn't really in need of one, her lack of socialization causes her lack of self identity and she relys on her expression through her art to replace it.
If her and nny made a painting about the same exact thing her's would feel empty and flat by comparison. Even as a woman with mental illness myself ( C-PTSD and a unspecified mood disorder at this current moment.) My art does the same thing hers would, I have constant apathy and not in the depression way in the "everything is exactly the same as staring at paint dry all day everyday". even my panic attacks are extremely calm, my heart and breathing slow down, I feel colder, I look like a statue getting rained on while im internally having a mental spiral.
I've never been able to portray emotion in my art the way someone else who doesn't have my problems could, I mirror everything even when its about my own trauma, I'm physically unable to draw a topic without some music or audio about that same topic. Every "abstract" line that looks like it was made erratically without care was deliberately placed there to look that way, it may look and feel real at a glance but under the microscope its not.
Maintaining a relationship with severe mental illness is extremely difficult and painful for both parties. Even in their first date you can see clear disconnect between them during the talk they have on the hill. They are never fully on the same page and both temporarily get frustrated by how the other responds, it physically hurts the more I reread I feel sick and I see them unable to properly understand what the other is asking of them especially as someone who has spent her entire life constantly around people on all different levels of the autistic spectrum.
Nny is unable to communicate his issues properly and devi is unable to understand his needs in a good enough way. Nny will continue to self destruct and self harm in multiple different ways, sick with guilt from burdening her with all his damage, and she will struggle with the mental strain it takes to try to support and drag someone out of a hole they aren't even sure they want to actually leave until they destroy each other.
Then johnny's art is discovered years later, academics wonder what paintings where made before or after his psychotic break, and devi's art is mentioned in relation to his or barely at all.
