It feels unattainable to not envy Peter Mendelsund — the person who can do every part, and properly. Masterful designer of a few of our period’s most recognizable ebook jackets. Lauded writer of fiction, in addition to books on graphic design. Artistic director of the storied month-to-month The Atlantic. Completed classical pianist. And now, movingly expressive painter.
However as his new ebook Exhibitionist demonstrates to devastating impact, it was desolation that made him one. Melancholy throughout the pandemic introduced him to the existential brink. As associated within the journal entries accompanying lush reproductions of 100 work he made all through this era, his frame of mind grew dangerously bleak throughout his household’s sojourn at a New Hampshire farm. Variously offended — songbirds “by no means shut the fuck up,” he fumes, the sight of a heron solely makes him “jealous of its silly single-mindedness”; unable to eat or sleep; fretfully superintending a stash of painkillers and alcohol; and stuffed with self-loathing, he descends to abyssal depths.
The ladder seems in an unlikely place: the humanities and crafts retailer Michaels. With out a plan, he finds himself loading his basket with acrylic paints and pre-primed canvases; subsequent, he goes to the ironmongery shop for much less advantageous art-y provides. He then repairs to an outdated barn on the rental property with solely a imprecise notion of what to do, and even much less data: His wide-ranging schooling appears to have lined each topic however portray. But his decision to strive offers the avenue of escape from his beleaguered psychological state: Solely doing may propel him from incipient unbeing. He begins, and eventually — “I had felt one thing whereas portray,” he writes. “What I felt was motion.”
Fittingly, the works that consequence from this act of self-healing (though portray is way from reductively redemptive, because the journal additionally examines philosophy, music, literature, friendship, and a bunch of different looking topics) are unconstrainedly gestural. Mendelsund’s model of motion portray yields work through which acrylics are glopped on, squeegeed, labored over, left to the weather, and written on (utilizing an extension or along with his nondominant hand, to keep away from preciosity). Different media embody rainwater, which lends a fragile melancholy to the floor; espresso; whiskey; mud; spray paint; Sharpie.
Giving himself the liberty to discover with out preconceptions or preconditions — he claims little familiarity with artwork historical past, though his oeuvre accommodates echoes of the giants of Twentieth-century artwork, from Klee and Miró by way of the Summary Expressionists, with a last fillip of Basquiat — kicked one thing unfastened in Mendelsund. However it unleashed not solely a generative creativity, but additionally a long-awaited reckoning with the darkish recollections of his bedeviling but deeply liked father, additionally an artist.
“Melancholy is a language: continuously mistranslated,” Mendelsund avers. The work in Exhibitionist communicate eloquently — and obstinately — for themselves.
Exhibitionist (2025), written by Peter Mendelsund and printed by Catapult, is obtainable for order on-line and in bookstores.
