Bill Whitten

“It was a painting of the unfolding of time. Time was merely another color in the painter’s palette. Rudoph II once owned it. Its shapes sang to him. Exhausted men swung scythes, women carried bundles in the distance. On a hillside covered in chest-high, golden wheat, the peasants carried out tasks they had performed a thousand times. The sky was yellow with light. The painting, almost a manual on how to harvest, had neither beginning nor end. Jason had stood before it one hundred times and assumed that the secret to his own existence could be revealed if he approached it from the right angle. At other times he felt the painting was suffocating, monstrous. It was a hymn to death: the infinity of the barren sky, the corporeality of the peasants, the cut wheat on the ground, waiting for workers to bind it. He imagined the painter, brush stroking the wooden panel, believed himself capable of seeing the entirety of the universe.”
― Bill Whitten, Brutes

“In my experience, love was like an unstable republic; regimes were constantly overthrown, dictators deposed, revolutions carried out or quashed. No matter what, there was always bloodshed. Whatever good thing a lover might believe he or she had worked tirelessly toward, or more likely, stumbled into, this good thing would inevitably come to an end, at neither the time nor the place of the lover’s choosing.”
― Bill Whitten, Brutes