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Howey painting about painter's mental health for some time, the last Bureau a painter crippled and frozen by his/our cage. "Music on headphones will be allowed further into the semester." Maximally untranscendent paintings. That they're even using paint, thickly, seems an ironic defeated gesture, attempting to regain the pleasure, or capital, of "painting" from things designed on screens, cut on plotters and pasted down before mindlessly spread with paint, the "painting" already finalized before paints even opened.
"Laughter is used as a defense mechanism used to guard against overwhelming anxiety. Laughter often diminishes the suffering associated with a traumatic event." "This nervous laughter is not true laughter, but an expression of tension and anxiety."seems basically the way these work. Though the desire to not become entangled as therapist or sympathizer to Howey's plight would perhaps make the mistake that half of paintings from the last 200 years has been artists trying to toss their baggage onto your back. Rothko with a cold bucket of darkness for you to carry. We could provide some sort of talking cure, lay these paintings on the couch, endlessly expound a psychological profile, develop an emotional game-plan, and send them out the door better than they came in but then we wouldn't have Rothko. Anyway, Step 5. "Avoid anonymous, disembodied and profoundly hopeless forms of self-expression."