William P.

Of course we can not entrust the suffering of the body to the artist. But art can redirect the question ‘what is disease?’ with surprising and useful results. To your physician’s eye there is weight and measure to the buccal insult sustained by this baby and you can describe its event quite accurately in biomechanical terms. I see a jewel that abscessed from mystery and my language, the language of painters, has the words to convey this mystery. In the language of the painter, a cheek is a canvas for the adornments of nature. Character, consciousness, and love are the accidents of pathogens that riddle their patterns on the skin. With his tubes of chancre black and vermillion blood the artist asks the question, who can live life as a blank, unwritten by the deformative mysteries?

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