Exhibitionist
1 Journal, 1 Depression, 100 Paintings
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- $17.99
Publisher Description
From acclaimed designer and novelist Peter Mendelsund, a deeply personal reflection on depression and the redemptive power of art, interspersed with 100 original paintings
In the early days of the pandemic, Peter Mendelsund and his family traveled up to a secluded New Hampshire farmhouse to weather the chaos. There began his journey through a crippling and seemingly intractable depression—which differed in degree but not in kind from episodes that have recurred periodically throughout his life—that brought him to the brink of suicide.
Relief came from an unlikely source: painting, something Peter had never contemplated doing before. And yet it became the thing that may very well have saved his life. Bleakly funny, profoundly moving, and—against all odds—truly inspiring, Exhibitionist is not just an account of a mind thinking through its own suffering in real-time, and of the author’s reckoning with his father's tortured legacy; it's also the story of the birth of an artist, and a portrait of an artist at work.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Novelist and graphic designer Mendelsund (Weepers) blends memoir and visual art in this striking account. Toward the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, Mendelsund and his family visited an isolated New Hampshire farmhouse, where Mendelsund tried painting for the first time as his despair about the state of the world spiraled into suicidal depression. In short, percussive micro-chapters ("Unpacked. Searched the property. Sat on the porch steps"), he captures both the drudgery of his condition and the ways art helped alleviate it. Along the way, he reflects on his artist father's life and death, his younger years as a classical musician, and the wisdom he's gleaned from writers including James Joyce and Roland Barthes. Particularly memorable are passages in which Mendelsund details the inspiration for his paintings, including one inspired by his late grandfather's fur coat ("It is facile to say that whenever I see a certain shade of brown, I think of him. Even if it is true"). The paintings themselves, which mostly appear in full-page photographs, range from claustrophobic and harrowing to playfully naive. Witty, inspiring, and endearingly unpolished, this chronicle of a creative mind learning to heal itself will enchant artists of all stripes. Photos.
