"How much of your art, would you say, is a direct projection of your feelings or experiences, and is it hard to separate the stories you tell from your public persona and your sense of identity?"
"I'll start with the first part–I basically feel like an artist is a filter. I feel like we're all experiencing reality together, and how you see it and convey that experience to other people is what makes you, you, I think. That's why there's able to be--I think people say there's seven stories, maybe less, universal stories, [those are] just the ones that exist but we keep hearing them over and over. But we're hearing something different each time, people are seeing a sunset differently, like, the way you'd describe it is different the way they'd describe it. And that's kind of the most important thing, as an artist, when you're able to explore death, for example. Numerous times, numerous people [have explored it], I think that's where your sense of identity comes from. For the second part, how it's hard to separate from the public persona and sense of identity: it's really easy to kind of lose yourself in all that. What I really started to enjoy was kind of the craft, like I actually re-found my love of physically performing music again in a live space, writing it, in that way and kind of reconnected with it–I began to realize there was this very automatic thing that would happen up there. And the more I realized that, the more I was able to detach from the entire thing in a really positive way. I spent a lot of time rediscovering or discovering who I was, in the period where I wasn't really doing much of anything, besides writing comics. So it became very easy. It was just, like... I don't know if it's a persona. I just get up there and do this thing, and then I get off the stage and act like I didn't just do the thing."
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theartofmadeline
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