J.Gilman | Nietzsche

When I see something I don't like, I'll grab my whiteout pen, pencil, or marker and fix it as soon as I see it hanging there. Scan that, print, and repeat. If some part needs a complete rework, I'll put tracing paper over it and redraw the whole thing. Drawing is just a process of correcting your mistakes.

This part of the job can go on for a while, because once you change one thing, that will throw off everything else a bit, especially if it's a portrait that has to look like a specific human. If it's an animal portrait, nobody is going to know if you captured an accurate likeness of the bird or snake. On top of that, if that human has their own art, or creative voice, the illustration style should reflect that. Nietzsche's writing always struck me as a man who had a mind in flames, so I drew his hair like fire. Because he was such a universal critic, I saw him with a skeptical but determined countenance.

This was a really fun part of the project because I got to pore through old 19th-century type sample catalogs to locate the metal-cast type that would have been used at that time and place. Books were usually published locally to the author because everything had to be delivered by hand and the printer probably set the type straight from the author's hand-written pages.

The face is called Steinshcrift and was first produced by the Haas type house in Switzerland around 1860. Nietzsche wrote the book in Sils Maria, Switzerland and spent some of his most productive years there, walking in the mountains.

Incidentally, he indirectly shows up in another movie because of this book. Composer Richard Strauss was so influenced by the book that he wrote a piece of music about it which was eventually used as the theme for 2001: A Space Odyssey.

He was a cultural critic and disliked most organized systems of thought like religion, politics, nationalism, socialism, stoicism, and democracy, seeing them as too confining for people to become their true selves by following them. For this reason, he never developed his own system of thinking or rules for how to live.

“I mistrust all systematizers and avoid them. The will to a system is a lack of integrity.”
—Friedrich Nietzsche

Essentially, you betray yourself by following someone else's system. As difficult as he recognized it would be, he thought that we should strive to create our own system of thought and behavior instead of subscribing to anyone else's out of convenience. He thought we should struggle to be our authentic human selves and take full responsibility for doing so.

Nietzsche is such a powerful, passionate, and evocative thinker that most anybody can read him and find themselves in his words. This is his strength as a philosopher, but it's also what makes his work so controversial. Many people who hold very different ideological views have experienced his writing and had the thought "He agrees with me!" and seek to claim him as an ally. I too had this thought many times when discovering even simple aspects that we had in common, like for example, he hated alcohol and only drank water. More often though, my reaction was something like "He stole my idea!" because he thought of my idea first.

Because of this tendency for his work to enmesh itself in those who read it, I believe he's often misinterpreted. If you think Nietzsche belongs to you and your ideals, read more of him. If you think he belongs to somebody else and their ideals, keep reading. Eventually, he'll tell you why those people don't have it right.

This print release will feature a Warm Grey edition of 50 and a variant Metallic Silver edition of 20.

Available at dangerprints.com on Friday, October 23 at 12:00 Noon EST.