In 1995, William Utermohlen, American painter, living in London, doing his thing, gets the diagnosis that makes every other piece of bad news you’ve ever received look like a parking ticket. Alzheimer’s. The brain-eater. The self-thief. The thing that doesn’t just kill you, it dismantles you piece by piece, room by room, until the lights go out and nobody’s home anymore.
And what does this guy do? Does he curl up? Does he spend his remaining coherent years in denial, pretending it’s not happening, medicating himself into oblivion?
No. He picks up his brushes and stares straight into the abyss.
Here’s the thing about Utermohlen that’ll rip your guts out: he decided to document the whole goddamn process. Not with clinical detachment, not with some brave-soldier bullshit, but with paint and canvas and whatever was left of his ability to translate what his eyes saw and his hands could still manage. For eight years… eight years… he painted himself disappearing. Not metaphorically. Literally. He watched himself vanish and he painted what he saw.
The early portraits? They’ve got structure, recognizable features, the basic grammar of a face. But as the disease does its work, as it strips away his motor control, his spatial perception, his ability to recognize what a face even is, the paintings start to fracture. They become these haunted, dissolving things. Picasso on a bad acid trip, except this wasn’t experimentation, this was documentation. This was a man recording his own erasure in real-time, adapting his technique to accommodate what the disease was stealing from him. When his hand wouldn’t cooperate, he found another way. When perspective collapsed, he painted the collapse.
This is what real courage looks like when you strip away all the Hollywood bullshit. The most unflinchingly honest thing thing I’ve seen in fine art, and I mean that with complete sincerity. No pretense. No art-school conceptual masturbation. Just raw, unflinching truth: “Here’s what it looks like when you lose yourself. Here’s what it feels like from the inside.”
The art world likes to talk about “exploring the self” and “deconstructing identity”, all that horseshit. Utermohlen didn’t explore. He didn’t deconstruct. He was deconstructed, whether he wanted it or not, and he had the courage, the maddening, beautiful courage, to show us what that actually means. These paintings aren’t metaphors. They’re evidence. Medical documents masquerading as art, or maybe art that doubles as the most honest medical record you’ll ever see.
What you’re left with is this body of work that exists in about seventeen different categories simultaneously, personal testimony, clinical case study, artistic achievement, existential horror show, love letter to consciousness itself. It’s everything art is supposed to be and rarely is: necessary, true, utterly devoid of bullshit, impossible to look away from even when you want to.
Here’s the unbearable truth lurking in these canvases: they’re about all of us. Utermohlen just had the misfortune, and the bizarre privilege, of seeing it happen faster, more dramatically, more undeniably. We’re all disappearing, all the time. Our cells are dying, our memories are degrading, our sense of self is way more fragile than we pretend it is. He just painted the process without the comfortable illusion of permanence most of us hide behind.
So. William Utermohlen. American painter. Alzheimer’s patient. Guy who looked at the worst thing that could happen to an artist, the dissolution of the very faculties that define your work, and turned it into the work itself. That’s not tragic. Well, fuck, it is. But it’s also defiant, and honest, and about as real as art gets.
The man painted himself vanishing and made it matter. Made it mean something.
That should haunt you.