The Painter

The Painter is a novel that follows the lives of a group of painters, their friends, and wealthy benefactors, beginning and ending within the spectacularly conceived art institute, Intona. The physical appearance and confines of the Intona Institute serve as a metaphor, a fictional representation of modern society bursting with creative power. In this allegorical novel, essential questions are explored about the way the internet and our digital lives distort, pervert, and even threaten our innate humanity. Featuring an ensemble cast, modern life is confronted and explored in a series of episodic chapters
that isolate on focused aspects of our digital lives; in the chapter Death By Information, a character from a fictional now-extinct civilization is sentenced to die by being kept awake in a well-lit room while being ceaselessly read to by an unbroken chain of readers. In The Story of Amadeo Verga and the Daughter of a Rich Noble, a young noblewoman in pre-revolutionary France is physically fixated on a sketch of an estranged lover, to the total detriment of life's opportunities going on all around her. Throughout the novel, a mysterious technocrat menaces the Intona family with apparently robotic animals, leading to a shocking encounter in a climax that you will be left pondering long after. All this and still so much more can be found within The Painter, an ambitious debut from literature's newest recluse author, Mikowski.