EXHIBITIONIST

How painting can save your life.

Celebrated book designer, nonfiction author (Cover, 2014, etc.), novelist (The Delivery, 2021, etc.), and now painter, Mendelsund recounts his struggle with depression in a journal that begins early in the Covid-19 pandemic and ends two years and some 100 new paintings later. At the outset of the pandemic and already suffering from serious depression, Mendelsund retreated with his family to a New Hampshire farmhouse where he began to paint for the first time in his life. The book’s opening lines cleanly telegraph the story to come: “Rain on the drive. The undersides of the leaves were bright. Coming up the road, the barn was the first thing I saw. Large, almost black; presiding over a farmhouse, shed, a murky pond, and a large, untended field that stretched off and off.” There is the looming darkness, along with the faintest glimmer of light. Painting, it turns out, will offer that light. Mendelsund’s short, staccato chapters and clipped sentences feel like the exhaustion of depression and space for what can’t be expressed in words, just as a barn studio makes space for art-making and recovery. Though reminiscent of Anne Truitt’s published journals (Yield, 2022, etc.), which grapple with art-making and life, and William Styron’s memoir of depression, Darkness Visible (1990), Mendelsund’s book is singular in its quiet wit: “A sky so blue it came across as aggressively middlebrow. This depressed me further.” His humor, along with full-color reproductions of his startlingly good paintings, is solace from his sadness, both for the author and reader. He makes these paintings left-handed, sometimes under the influence. “My diligence in maintaining my incompetence has paid off. I have said my final fuck-you to expertise. Amazing.” And it is amazing. A kind of alchemical miracle: dilettante into artist, depression into creation, something slapdash into something wonderful.

A wry and fearless portrait of depression, and the strange solace of art-making in middle age.