The First Artist

                Once, there was an artist. He wasn’t a very good artist. This wasn’t because he had no talent. Far from it, he would actually have been a great artist if not for just one thing: every single thing he created had been created before. He painted Monet before he even realized it was Monet. He invented Pascal’s triangle. After every creative victory, he would go to his artistic friends and say, “Look what I have done! Look at this masterpiece I have created!” His friends would say, “When are you going to start creating? Look at your strokes, your genius. You’re far past studying this classic s**t.”
                So the artist lamented, (day) by (day) creating things that had already been created. Soon he stopped creating. He started drinking, because it was a lot easier to drink than it was to create. He stopped leaving his house except to buy food, and then not even to buy food. He didn’t answer the door when his landlord visited to collect the rent. He had no money to pay with. Eventually he boarded up all of the doors and windows to his studio apartment, spending the (days) wasting away in silent agony at his inability to create something new.
                “God?” he asked. “What am I doing in this late world, where everything that there is to do is already done?”
                And God said, with a little beautiful whisper in his ear, “You were born here.”
                And then everything went white.

                The artist wakes up. Still can’t see anything. He stutters question words that don’t really have a target, and they float away into nothing. Just vagueness until the artist looks down, sees his own hands, his arms, his legs. He is hardly blind. He is just standing on a pure white floor. The floor expands to each horizon, and nothing else can be seen. The sky is also bleach-white. The artist stumbles a couple steps then finds a note. It says:
                “You are in a new world. Everything you do here is original.”
                The artist studies the note. Then, he starts crying like a maniac. He eats the note. He runs and jumps and falls and doesn’t care. He is on unbroken ground, nothing he does has ever been done before. He’s Neil Armstrong stepping gingerly onto the moon, and it feels great.
                Before long, he gets tired. As soon as he thinks this, the world goes from white to black. It is now easy for him to rest his eyes.
                When he wakes up, the light slowly rises for ten minutes to its favored luminescence. The artist yawns, stretches. He thinks for a second, and remembers his daily routine, and subsequently remembers that he is on a world of foreign matter. The only other thing he had even seen on the world was the note that he had eaten in a fit of ecstasy. The note, though, had already served its purpose, and was doing what was probably the only other thing it would be useful for filling his stomach.
                Still though, as his thoughts come back to his stomach, it begins to whine. He paces, wondering what he will do about breakfast.
                He gets tired of pacing after awhile and sits down.
                As soon as he does, he spies another note. He walks over to pick it up. It says:
                “Think.”
                He thinks that this note is some serious bullshit. He eats the note, because it’s the only thing there. He then sits down again, lays down, lays his head back and closes his eyes. He thinks of what he would like to have for breakfast. Bacon and eggs and maybe toast, or even just some cold cereal. He shoos these thoughts from his head. Fantasizing doesn’t help one’s situation. He’ll only make himself hungrier. So he lies there for a few minutes, thinking of his predicament and of the cruelty that his new world would so quickly be gone.
                After a few minutes of lying there, he gets tired of doing nothing, even though he has no energy and he sits up. In front of him is a plate, on top of which lay eggs, bacon, and a slice of toast with butter. Next to the plate is a bowl of cold cereal with a spoon.
                He realizes that the note was a good answer after all. Think.
                He closes his eyes and thinks of a glass of orange juice and a fork. When he opens his eyes, they are there.
                He eats voraciously, like he has never eaten before, and he realizes that in this world, he has never eaten before. No one has.
                In this world, by putting spoon to cereal, he is an artist.
                He feels better than he has ever felt in his life.

                He starts to create as voraciously as he ate. He looks to the horizon and sees mountains. He looks to his left and sees a tree, looks to the right and sees a brook, looks down and sees grass. He thinks up the perfect little house for himself in his world, full of beautiful furniture and amazing paintings, bringing to life many artists’ portfolios. He doesn’t know that. He creates an entire land for himself, full of all kinds of wondrous beautiful things.
                There only seems to be one rule:
                Surveying his grounds one (day), he thinks aloud, “Something is missing.” Then he realizes the difference between his forest and the ones where he came from. There is no life in his forest.
                So he closes his eyes and thinks of a bluebird. He sees it in his mind’s eye, chest puffing, feathers fluffing, as it flaps its wings and flounders through the air.
                When he opens them, he sees white. He is frightened, and looks around.
                He sees most of his creation. What was in his field of vision when he tried to create the bluebird was destroyed. He is angry, but he knows that he has enough brains left to recreate that part of his world. He never tries to create life again.
                Wondering, he thinks up an axe. It is beautiful. He takes up the axe and starts running, and with full force slams the axe into one of his trees.
                The tree falls. In the center of it is not the series of tubes that feed it, but a ringed field of brown.
                Our artist had never heard of xylem and phloem, which are those little tubes that suck water and minerals up out of the ground up into the tree. He had heard that you can tell how old a tree is by counting its rings. His trees were not alive.

                (Days) and (days) go by, maybe. The artist realizes one (day) that time is subjective in a world based on him. He is awake and it is (day) until (night) when he is tired. These things, though, don’t really exist or if they do they don’t matter. As far as he is concerned, the artist decides, there is no such thing as a (day) or a (minute) or a (year) or a (second). The artist thinks aloud, “You might as well just call everything a while.” This appeals to his sense of humor, and as a matter of fact whenever he thinks about time he does call everything awhile, when he remembers.

                After a while, the artist stops creating so much. He is starting to get bored. He thinks, “I am a great painter. I need to start painting again.” So he does. He stays inside his cabin some (days) and imagines up canvases and he already had an easel, so he paints.
                But painting is not enough. He is still bored. His creations get more and more wild. He creates abominable creatures with his now highly trained imagination, and leaves them just hanging in the air there. If God walked by such a mass of teeth and claws and coagulated blood, the artist would have been embarrassed. However, God doesn’t visit much anymore. There hasn’t been another note.
                The artist begins to repeat his depressive pattern. He spends more and more (days) inside, painting. His paintings begin to get sparse as he wondered about the world around him. They become nothing but one or two colors, arranged in such and such a way to evoke emotion within him. He begins to lose sight of the point of creating. Though he can create, everything he creates was created with his mind. He is familiar with all of it, and he is beginning to lose the ability to be impressed by anything. He becomes familiar with his own mind on such an intimate level that nothing surprises him.
                With all the time he has to think, he begins to compose ridiculous questions, ones that he knows are unanswerable. He thinks things like:
                “What am I doing here?”
                He doesn’t notice the little note that floats down through his chimney, into his fire. The note says:
                “Nothing.”

                The artist falls deeper and deeper down, yearning for something else. Sure, here he is an artist. But he wants more. He wants to be surprised, he wants to be influenced. He wants to be in a world where everything isn’t certain, where he doesn't control every law and every existence.
                He wants to be back on earth.
                He wishes that he knew how to get back there.
                Then, an idea comes to him. He closes his eyes, and he thinks:
                “I am on Earth.”
                The second he opens his eyes, they brighten with delight. He is in the middle of the city, there are people all around. Traffic is flying by noisily. He is back home.
                He turns to his left and sees a woman. He walks up to her. He says, “Hi!” and smiles brightly.
                She doesn’t say anything, and continues to look off into the distance.
                “Hi!” He repeats.
                There is still no answer. She doesn’t even move, the artist thinks to himself about how rude she must be. Doesn’t she know how long it’s been since he’s seen a person?
                “Hi!” the artist says.
                The mannequin just stares.
                “Hi! Hi! Hi, hi, hi, hi, hi, hi, hi!”
                The artist begins to shake. His eyes well up with tears as he brushes the face of the woman that never really was with his fingers.
                The artist closes his eyes, and he thinks:

                “I do not exist.”

Reviews

[Eira]

Very interesting story indeed!
I particularly enjoy the twist the story takes, of him geting "his own world" to create and change and eventually growing bored with it. The ending is superb, not your run off the mill "it was a dream" or where everything is set right. You might want to reconsider the beginning where he "reinvented Pacal's triangle". Mathematics and painting don't exactly go hand-in hand.

“Look what I have done! Look at this masterpiece I have created!” His friends would say, “When are you going to start creating? Look at your strokes, your genius. You’re far past studying this classic s**t.”

I get the point of the passage, but wouldn't it give even more impact if they criticised him for copying? Something along the lines of "When are you going to start creating, and not just copy someone elses work?"

Also at the ending, maybe a line to explain why they turned out to be mannequins? At a first glance I was honestly lost, thinking about it I guess it has to do with him not being able to imagine their personalities and "thinking" their lives (also the episode with the blue-bird springs to mind). So he just gets a copy of Earth look-wise without actual content... Never mind that last part actually, it's good as it is :)

All in all, good writing!