art
Painters, sculptors, and the ones who chased chickens across canvas.
After the Shift
A road inspector for Le Corbusier's rationally planned Chandigarh spent eighteen years cycling into a protected forest after work to build a secret twelve-acre kingdom of gods and goddesses out of smashed pottery, broken bangles, and discarded toilet bowls.
A Little Patch of Yellow Wall
Marcel Proust wrote most of his novel in a cork-lined bedroom he fumigated five times a day with a hallucinogenic nightshade powder.
The Honeymoon
The man who signed a urinal and hung it in a gallery quit modern art for competitive chess, and then married an heiress who lasted seven months.
The Emperor Made of Vegetables
What do you do when your court painter, a decorated cathedral man, starts rendering your jurist as a heap of raw poultry pinned around a syphilitic face?
The Man Who Painted the Dead
How do you paint a wild bird at exact life size without it moving?
The Notation on the Buttocks
What if the sheet music tattooed across a damned soul's buttocks in a 500-year-old painting of Hell turns out to be... actually playable?
Paint Sacred Art
What does a 59-year-old Baptist preacher do when a face appears in a smudge of paint on his fingertip and tells him to start painting?
The Lady Must Go Home
What kind of master criminal steals a Gainsborough, then sleeps on top of her for twenty-five years?
The Bait Camp Visionary
How does a shrimp seller who couldn't swim, living alone on a sandspit reachable only by boat, end up on Betty Parsons's walls beside Pollock and Rothko?
The Soot and the Spit
What does a self-taught artist do when the family finally retires the wood stove and his only source of ink disappears?
The Paintings the Spirits Told Her to Hide
What if the first abstract paintings in Western art were commissioned by a spirit named Amaliel for a temple that didn't exist?
The Painter Who Painted the Room
She started on Masonite, then cookie sheets, then scallop shells, then the breadbox — and then she ran out of small things.