The Allure of the Ascetic Aesthete

I'll probably write more on this later, but let me know what you think about it so far:



Van Gogh, foregoing food to afford oils and tobacco, choosing to paint in privation. Dickens’ artistically evocative ragamuffins. Bone-weary fingers, sallow-eyed, slack-jawed. Scratching out verse after wrenching verse by ubiquitous dullflickering candle. The tortured creative mind, appreciated only in death, living well only posthumously. Always in appositional opposition to their contemporary and colloquial ‘sellouts.’

Need the artist starve to death? Is wizening only achieved through withering? Must the lifetaking knife be rusted, blunted—requiring multiple brushstrokes to finish its gruesome gouache? Or do we merely hang this downtrodden story as a conventionalized backdrop to creativity, constructing separation to excuse and assuage the consciences of those who choose to never create?