A Painterly Manifesto

It’s never been my place to say who deserves better or who deserves worse in this world. Despite my failures, my successes, and everything in between, I always found myself functioning by the logic that things are chaotic and chance-based no matter how hard we try to deny it.
In 1952 I was born to a wealthy couple who had inherited most of their fortune from some nameless relative. Inquiries into this matter almost invariably were met with quiet stares and mumbled dismissals. Father, with his meek tendencies, only ever succeeded at filling my head with naïve expectations of how to treat other people and fulfill obligations. Mother, with her stoic nature and unflinchingly cold hands, only saw potential in me through my ability to create things. Otherwise - as a son - I contributed very little to the well-being of the household.
What with its sprawling marble floors and silent maids, what could I have? If I was not studying music theory, or painting, or sculpting with leftover clay, I had little to no interaction with the world outside my room. After my father’s suicide in ‘68, mother’s stoic nature turned from brusquely attentive to excruciatingly obsessive, criticizing my habits, my mannerisms, every little mistake I made. I had no doubt she showed only so much restraint against my spiritless father who undoubtedly would have crumbled beneath her at a moment’s doubt, and with his passing, decided whatever unresolved traumas she had been dealt was better off passed to me.
The sleepless hours spent perfecting my strokes, the agonized morning hours toiling to clear my room of all personal organizations and projects, and the verbal chastisements were all tolerable to an extent. The beatings even, I could rationalize as just another form of a mother’s love. But when Mother began forcing me to partake in her nude studies, when I heard the sharp commands to join her on the stand and feel her curves, to explore her inner being, that’s when I knew love was dead. I still hear her coldly grunting in my ear while she rode me, that this is how the old masters would have become even greater than they already were, by “knowing” their subjects. This would continue irregularly until I was 20, when she finally agreed to one day let me attend a private art institute where I could potentially become a professor.
The illusion of escape worked for a while. My peers and instructors were amazed at my body of work which was something of a combination between magic realism and classical antiquity paintings. I touched upon everything from life and death to morality and the soul, with a tenderness not often seen. And yet not a single one of them could see the pain in every single stroke. Had the likes of Bacon been around earlier, perhaps the patterns would’ve been slightly more apparent in my case.
And one day, on the exact day I received a communique from the board of curators who reviewed my work for an upcoming exhibition, I was informed by the authorities of Mother’s death in the late afternoon. Dead from an unnoticed, underlying heart condition, found by one of our house servants. Would you believe me if I said I wept? I continued to do so even after being told I was scheduled to put my work on display in various metropolitan areas like New York, Chicago, Seattle and Los Angeles.
I would go on to explode onto the art scene and became a common name on the lips of every critic, every one of my contemporaries, my friends, my detractors. Fortune found her way into my bed. I had drug-fueled orgies every Tuesday. A most-definitely illegal cocktail every morning, afternoon and night. Studios destroyed by wild bouts of passion and crudeness, only to be completely redecorated and furnished the morning after. Looking down from an ivory tower at little people doing little things like hard labor and worrying about what's for lunch? Only 25. No time to ruminate when you were basting in your own - and other’s - juices.
The years went on and as I rubbed elbows with this country’s elite, my work became somewhat more … vindictive. I started tossing dismissive, sneering messages into the paintings. Little jabs at the viewer’s intellect, hideous little doodles only perceptible from certain angles. And they ate the shit up. I remember one analytical take in a documentary describing a very obvious cock-and-balls superimposed over a commissioner’s visage as ‘a cheeky, playful and intimate gesture of the relationship between artist and audience.’ Complete horse apples. Why do these people pretend to be things they are not, I asked myself. Can they not see they’re the same as me? I started seeing my contemporaries as nothing but dogs in suits. No matter how vile, how macabre I made my work, all I got was laughter and admiration in return. All the while I’d look down and see the homeless below us, not even having the privilege to fuck or evacuate their bowels in privacy on the streets. Suffering while I was up here, consuming and indulging every sense I had just because I was slightly smarter than the rest of the animals. What was the difference, I ask of you.
I forgot my name, my place in the world to the point I barely showed up to my own shows anymore. And to this point, my most favored critic - a man named Herbert Jones - would happily prey on my absences, listing my fatal personality flaws and elite lifestyle as reasons for my dips in popularity. On occasion, his attacks would cut dangerously close to the rumors about my relationship with my mother. Despite his lack of success in drumming up backlash, his existence was enough reason for me to realize he was right. I was one of the animals. My work had no more substance. I was floating in the water.
That is … until I found IT. A thing, an instrument which, previously unknown to me, lay dormant in my grandfather’s old archives while searching for something to reinvigorate my passions. After years of rumination, months of sleepless nights realizing I was stagnating, I finally had the means to take back the beauty I used to see in everyone and everything. Even knowing how hard I’d been pushed by the loveless animals, I wanted to see it again.
I invited the Critic to my home under the pretense I wanted his personal opinion on a new series I was vested in. And there, with the arcane capabilities of that object coursing through my entire being, I tore his physical body asunder, leaving only the tatters of his mind and soul flapping about inside a dark approximation of reality, for all eternity. It would only be later, after fleeing the city lights, that I realized a crucial fact about the human figure which my mother had beat into me early on. Before I recognized the flexibility of her philosophy of pain.
Human suffering is an art form. The human body is a paint brush. True change occurs in the world when enough pain is reached that a threshold between the ideological and the physical world can be broken.  Therefore, my work is an exploration into the changing of the landscape using that pain. As an artist, I am subject to the laws of my own changes; let suffering paint my being, and let my ideas contort the mind. Is that not the very point of art? To break, to remake; to move, and be moved; to feel, and be felt! Yes! Why, in this god forsaken, evil and wretched world, have we forgotten such a crucial and fundamental truth to the arts? Mark my words. They'll know real art. They WILL know it by the time I've turned to dust.
But listen, very very closely. I can hear a growing chorus of murmurs and giggles above the rush of water and the distant sucking of city traffic. A throng of women approach from above, where the shadows of the bridge hide my form and what remains of my belongings. Something dazzles above their heads: not quite lamplight, but something else. Something metallic and pointed. I wonder: will they be my audience, or my newest piece?
It doesn’t matter.
None of it will matter.
Category:Mental Illness
Category:Diary/Journal
Category:William See