The Death of an Artist

Posted on 23rd October 2026

When I was a child I, like many people, had dreams of being famous when I grew up. In my junior school years The Beatles were national icons, and the footballer George Best was the hero of Manchester United, so my peers generally aspired after ideals like these. In my case I rather fancied the idea of being an artist, though I am not sure that I had a clear idea of what this meant in terms of a lifestyle. In secondary school others began to get more realistic about their careers, but while I had more of a taste for the sciences than the arts I still held on to the idea of becoming a painter. I had a slightly more concrete vision by now; it generally involved a luxurious house – no languishing in freezing garrets for me – and beautiful girls desperately competing for my attention.

It was around this time that I read a short story (whose title and author’s name are now regrettably lost to me) about an artist. He was brilliant and flamboyant – he loved to wear a swirling black cape – but he struggled to sell his work. The story, as told by a friend of his, describes a visit to the artist’s studio where there was a large painting of a castle, its drawbridge down. The friend notes that in a piece of self-indulgence the artist has included himself in the painting; he is walking across the drawbridge, wearing his cloak, about to enter the castle.

However things go from bad to worse for the artist, and he ends by killing himself. The friend is given the job of going to the studio to evaluate what is there.

He finds the painting of the castle just as he last saw it, except for one thing: the black-cloaked figure is gone.

This quite caught my imagination, and when I later decided I wanted to paint a mural on my bedroom wall I recalled this. I won’t say it was the only influence – I may well have ended up choosing something similar anyway – but as it was there was a castle with a path winding its way up to it out of my room.

That mural taught me many lessons. The practical ones were: despite thinking you have a clear idea of how the completed picture is going to look, always lay it out on paper first. Otherwise you realise your composition is going to end up not quite how it was intended. In my case this is shown (among other things) by the way there is a gravestone standing somewhat incongruously in the centre. The inscription on it reads:

THIS STONE
was set here on 7th January
1985 by
SIMON BUTLER
to fill an embarrassing EMPTY
SPACE in the middle of the
picture
AND MAY GOD HAVE
MERCY ON HIS SOUL

Other factors to be borne in mind are things like the way emulsion paint changes colour as it dries, meaning that it is almost impossible to match paint applied at a later date. It also makes gradual gradation (such as the paling of the sky towards the horizon) extremely difficult.

It is a lot harder to paint something when the subject is considerably larger than your field of view; painting on paper where you can move your head forward to attend to detail and back to check general shape is far easier than having to trot back and forth all the time – especially if you’re up a set of stepladders. The important thing is to remember to climb down the steps before moving away from the wall. Oh, by the way, the torn wallpaper is painted on; I thought it an incredibly subtle touch to make it look as if I had clawed my way through to reveal the hidden landscape.

But I am wandering. What I was going to say is that work on this mural must have been spread over about 8 years, on and off (mainly off, needless to say). At first I’d decided that the path should lead out from a patch of woodland in the foreground, and across a desert to the castle, but after a while I became unhappy with this idea. Instead I saw the castle as being on a prominence at the edge of what had once been a sea, but which had now dried up. The foreground was the edge of a cliff; it had been a harbour. It was rather disheartening to start all over again. It was hard work. I realised I had little idea of how to paint much of the detail, despite believing I knew exactly how things should look. I became bored and disillusioned. This turned out to be about the last attempt at a mural I ever did.

The first version of the mural, before the desert became a dried-up sea.

Detail of the castle under construction.

I was actually commissioned by two or three mates to do paintings for them; being on a smaller scale, and under pressure to produce something within a set time, I managed tolerably well. For example there is A Matter of Taste; the painting I did of the six-year-old daughter of a couple I knew. However when it came to paintings without this pressure I rapidly lost interest.

I underwent a bit of a revival when I got a computer, a graphics tablet, and, eventually, Photoshop. My sister suggested I should do some illustrations for traditional fairy tales to print out and give to my young nieces.

This turned out to be a failure for quite different reasons. I tended to prefer the idea of pictures of beautiful female characters – I am not sure why – but at some stage in the process the image of a lovely and innocent girl became terribly corrupted. A picture of Red Riding Hood was probably the best example. Somehow she ended up considerably older and better developed than I suspect the writer intended, and, worse, her blouse for some reason failed to meet at the front. I was shocked. The same sort of thing always seemed to happen. I have yet to complete one suitable for a child’s eyes. There is, I suppose, a possible adult market for such things, but I would rather not be associated with them.

At the moment I have a half-completed picture of Sleeping Beauty as she climbs up a spiral stair to the turret room where here nemesis awaits. She is wearing a blue gown which covers her from neck to ankle, and from shoulder to elbow. It is made a material sufficiently stiff to flatten her bosom – if indeed there is one under there. It is a test to me to see how long this situation will last, but I fear that my nieces will be in their twenties or thirties before I ever manage to print anything acceptable out.

Sleeping Beauty, doomed never to reach completion, but at least modestly covered.

However I regard myself as having reached a dead end as a painter. Photography is so much easier. I will have to manage without the luxurious house and the admiring girls. I think I can do so.

Oh, and yes, as you can see, I did manage to restrain myself from including myself in the mural. Appealing though the concept is to my escapist nature, I didn’t want to plagiarise an idea so blatantly – and besides, the castle looks as if it lacks even the most basic amenities, never mind a comfortable bed.

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NOTES

I haven’t entirely given up. I recently bought a Huion pen display, and I am attempting to adjust to using the freeware graphics editor Krita. The problem is the usual one: the learning curve is steep, and the more difficult you find it to get started, the more likely you are to give up. Right now the incentive is to produce some illustrations for this blog – we shall see how that goes!