During the COVID-19 pandemic, novelist and graphic designer Peter Mendelsund began his journey through a debilitating depression that was more severe than any episodes he had previously experienced. On the brink of suicide, Mendelsund found solace in a new practice: painting. In his book Exhibitionist: 1 Journal, 1 Depression, 100 Paintings, published by Catapult in June, Mendelsund interweaves text from his journal (the only writing he did during the pandemic) with the visual art he composed—art that may have ultimately saved his life. “I know nothing about painting, nothing about its history, theory, techniques…. This illiteracy makes painting easy,” he says, recounting the beginning of his practice. “There is no fear of failure, and there are no expectations to satisfy.”

Embracing imperfection, Mendelsund painted and wrote exclusively with his nondominant left hand. Every canvas contains text, though not all the words are visible. When Mendelsund started working on his art, his method involved painting words and then smearing them with a trowel until the text was unrecognizable. After creating about fifty paintings this way, he became interested in depicting legible words—and specifically prepositions. He describes on, under, above, through, and in as “wryly redundant,” the “atoms of language, pointing to the artwork’s own atomic units.” Mendelsund embraces spare expression throughout the book, in both text and image.

Such is the approach he took for the painting above, which he describes as “an honest” one. “There is, in fact, a terrible painting on the other side of it,” he says, though he admits he isn’t sure why he hated it. “I flipped the canvas and restretched it and began painting on the other side,” he adds. “This painting became a visual analogue to my hiding words.” The freedom and comfort Mendelsund found in painting did in turn affect his writing practice. “I wrote with a lighter touch,” he says. “I would try to stay loose, think of words and sentences and then just splatter them around. Rearrange them. Not get too attached to anything in particular. Erase ideas, ‘paint’ over them.” In taking himself “less seriously,” even as he wrote about suffering, Mendelsund discovered more humor and levity in his work. His latest novel, Weepers, about a group of professional mourners, was also published in June, by Farrar, Straus and Giroux.