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| Six paintings of cats by Louis Wain, shown as a group to illustrate their increasingly abstract and electric nature, attributed to his suffering from schizophrenia |
When I was eighteen, I had a passionate argument with my father about my life's priorities. I insisted that producing good art mattered above all else. Because I was a teenager who still boiled down everything to causative choices, I declared that I would happily die destitute if doing so meant I'd produce a few revelatory works in my lifetime. My father angrily dismissed my stance as romantic and foolish, but I held my ground (as is the wont of eighteen-year-old ideologues), and proclaimed that I'd sooner kill myself than create artwork for money or popular acclaim.
