The Dead Painter

The painter was famous for his vanity, or at least that's what the critics all said. Ever since he had been a teenager and first picked up a brush and tried his hand at art, he had grown rich on nothing but self-portraits. His first exhibition, age nineteen, had been in a small loft apartment where alcohol was poured freely and drugs were shared. His first line of cocaine left his nose bleeding that night, and he had taken a picture of his drug-ruined face and painted it the next day.
Then his face was brown and youthful and strong, and the drugs had made his eyes red. A critic who had seen this painting had said, "There is blood here. More than is seen. There is blood beneath, as well." Many times he had been offered countless sums of money for this painting, but instead he had decided to keep it. It was the first painting he hung in his private gallery.
Now an old man, the painter moved about in his gallery, purveying the ruined landscape of his life captured in these images. The gallery formed a spiral toward the center, starting with his earliest paintings on the outer rim, and moving to his later paintings toward the center. In his meander through the dimly lit rooms, he could trace his entire world: his changing perception of art, his changing perception of beauty, his changing perception of self. He took it all in, starting with that first one that he had kept, with a bloody nose and eyes widened by cocaine, a look of surprise or shock or awe plastered on what was his innocent visage.

He had only painted self-portraits his whole life. Never a Van Gogh landscape or an O'Keefe flower, a Picasso table or a Magritte pipe, a Degas ballerina or a Toullouse-Latrec harem; although, many critics said that the painter had emulated each of these in turn. And maybe he had, but never with a purpose. When asked, he had said that he only painted what he knew, and what he knew best was himself.

He walked by a few early works and stopped at a charcoal he had done when he was twenty-five. In the foreground was a woman wrapped in his bedsheets, frozen in a pirouette, in the background a mirror portrayed the painter steadfastly drawing on a tablet, staring not at the girl nor at the tablet, but directly into the mirror.
The painter remembered this drawing very vividly. The first exhibition where it had been displayed, there had been a great deal of talk about him being portrayed in the background in one of his drawings. This was easily his most successful piece that night, and he had planned to sell it for top dollar.
By this time he had grown out of loft apartments and was now in the business, showing his work at the trendiest art galleries in the region: this one was in a basement painted entirely blood red with extremely bright lights behind the walls that made the room seem to glow, to be illuminated somehow within.
He had brought a leading critic to that piece, hanging exalted in the middle of the room, and had asked what the critic thought. The painter had smiled with foreknowledge that the review would be gleaming, and it was, but after the critic had finished his deconstruction, the painter, whose smile had faded into a grimace, had torn down the work with such violence that part of the wall came with it suddenly filling the room with a blinding light. Bathed in the light, he had announced that all offers for the drawing were null and void, he would keep it for himself.
The next day, he broke off his engagement to the dancer in the drawing and painted a portrait of a miserable, bloodshot, tear-streaked eye which he titled, "My Sorry Self."

Wandering still deeper into his gallery, he watched as his paintings progressed - or rather decomposed - along with his life. Here a painting of him with a whore, there a depiction of himself through an empty bottle, and eventually a particularly violent painting wherein he was stabbing a well-dressed man in the
middle of the street.
The well-dressed man had been a young critic who had idolized the painter from the first piece he had seen, also age nineteen. The artist had grown older by this time and embraced the chance for young and hopeful companionship. He had said that he saw a little bit of himself inside the young critic, like a flame that once burned within himself, "and which maybe still did." The critic was overwhelmed, and they spent a lot of time drinking together and discussing art and beauty and women. The painter grew fonder and fonder of his companion as they found their views had more and more in common.
One evening, the painter had the young critic over to his apartment, where they commonly drank and discussed, and the painter decided to show the critic a new piece he had been working on. He brought out the canvas and stood it in front of his television. The critic was breathless. He said that the piercing blue eyes of the painting were the most beautiful things he had ever seen, then the painter stopped him and kissed him and they made love in front of the bright blue eyes of the self-portrait.
When they finished, the critic turned to the painting and tried to analyze it, the painter kissed his back and neck where the brown hair faded into skin. The critic said, "It's so strange."
"What's strange?"
"You don't have blue eyes. Your eyes are green. Why did you change their color?"
When the critic left, the painter tried to correct the eye color, but after a few strokes realized that he had ruined the painting in the attempt. In a blind rage which bordered on an infuriated trance, he tore at the painting and when he finished, before him was a painting of himself stabbing the young critic in cold
blood.
The painter resolved never to see the critic again.

The painter finally reached the very center of the gallery where there sat a blank canvas, a chair, painting supplies on a nearby cabinet, and a mirror. He sat down at the canvas and thought about his age and his life and thought that before he died, he should paint one more thing. So he decided to paint himself dead.
He worked feverishly, mixing reds and blues and yellows to achieve an ideal palate, using long strokes, short strokes, he painted and his naked body on the floor. He painted every liver spot on his body, every tired wrinkle and imperfection. He made his skull, his neck, torso, arms, and legs and they all looked completely devoid of life. And he sat there painting until he was completely finished, which took more than twenty hours.
At the end, he sat back, hunched and exhausted, and looked at his final painting. He looked for a long time, and he was confused because the self-portrait didn't look like him at all.
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