'The Portrait Confronts the Artist' by Cheryl Snell

 

Where is my belly? I blacked it out. What about the kit and caboodle inside? That, too. It was just a jumble of beginnings. Did you see the second brain they say lives in the gut? No. That is a controversial theory, like climate change and evolution.

Scraping the canvas raw, the artist says, This is just not working for me. He puts the putty knife down and looks for the image that has slipped through to the underpainting. Complaining from deep inside the dark smudges, the portrait can be heard to say, Why do you always go too far?