Size: 12" x 18"

Title: Bibemus Quarry

Time was not on my side; it was now the spring of 1868; the years were slipping by; I was at a total impasse; there wasn't the slightest hint of progress in my work. The acknowledgement of this condition destroyed my will to fight, I drifted with my frustrations, and on certain days, when the depression peaked, I didn't work at all. I lay stretched out on my bed, eyes staring at the ceiling, brooding over the idiotic choice of seeking a career as a professional artist. Choosing another direction, at this late stage, was out of the question. The avenues of retreat were cut off; I was no longer a young man who could easily switch tracks into another type of work, and begin all over again. I had the desperate feeling that my friends and family had given up on me as a hopeless failure, a broken figure of a man, doomed to well-deserved obscurity. I knew my character played games with me, that the extreme nature of my thinking was a form of torture, that the agony of this would go on no matter happened.