On the Kuplin Paintings

[img]http://www.museum.ru/Outsider/img/psih_07b.jpg[/img]
[i]Copy of [url=http://ljplus.ru/img/a/l/almost_cat/card.jpg]this painting[/url][/i]

A. Kuplin was a patient in a Soviet mental hospital in the 1980s. He suffered from a rare and severe mental disorder. Part of his therapy was psychopathological expression, during which he painted copies of Russian paintings. He was constantly seeing his own fantasies all around him. He also had a certain phobia, which was key to the disorder. One painting, a copy of a 1972 Russian postcard depicting people riding troikas, or sleds, on the feast day of Maslenitsa, was used in a college lecture. The psychiatry professor conducting the lecture claimed that there was one tell-tale sign in it that exposed the painter's madness.

The professor did not say what that sign was. The only clues he gave were:
- Don’t look for small details; look at the whole.
- If you figure out what the phobia was, you have the answer.
- Ask yourself what could have preceded this scene.
- Think of what the place would look like with all the objects removed.
- Key words are "water" and "air".
- What would you hear if you were inside the painting?

The professor said that during the 15 years of his teaching, only one student had figured it out. However, he conceded that a guess that the detail was that the viewer was a burning straw effigy (based on the tradition of straw effigies being burned on Maslenitsa to mark the coming of spring) was close, but not quite correct. He also revealed to his students that the closest guess that they had yet proposed was the fear of open spaces.

Notable differences between the original and the copy:
- There are no telephone lines.
- The red blanket/cloak trailing the top troika (sled) is now on the middle one.
- Only a faint resemblance of door behind the baby carriage can be seen.
- The amount of people and many colors have changed.
- The smoke from the chimneys is different.
- Facial expressions have changed.
- All the troika riders are looking towards the viewer.
- Bushes at lower front of photos are gone or painted differently.
- The white trees towards the front are placed differently.
- No poofs of snow are behind the sleds.
- A lone girl is wearing blue in the center sled.
- One accordion is missing.

Notable hypotheses:
- The people were painted inside a snow globe.
- The viewer is a snowflake.
- The secret is in the paint itself, and not the images that are painted. For example, the painter might use a certain color, might not use water, or he paints all stroked in a similar fashion.
- Fear of loneliness, represented by the people on the sled staring at him
- Fear of spiders, represented by the legs of the horses
- The sleds are sinking into a unfreezing lake
- Fear of darkness, represented by the lit houses

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The Snowman
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The viewer is a snowman, frightened of melting because of the approaching spring-time. The phobia is a fear of change.

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The Hoax
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[quote]Whether the “professor” is aware it’s a hoax or not, I don’t know. But I do know a thing or two about mental illness and I can smell something that is a lie when it comes to someone who can "see" mental illness in a painting a mile away. That’s like saying you could tell a person was a Republican just by looking at her. Or that Beethoven was deaf just by listening to his works.

There is no tell-tale sign in this painting.[/quote]
- Dr. John M. Grohol, CEO and founder of Psych Central

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The Snowflake
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The viewer is a falling snowflake and the phobia is a fear of falling.

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The Mirror
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[quote]All the children on the sleighs are staring quietly at the painter, while the sleighs seem to be carrying on at full speed.

I find that absolutely horrifying.[/quote]
- nervousfritz, a member of MetaFilter.com

[quote]In all his paintings, and there are many, the characters are aware that they are in a painting. Because they're not characters, they look right at you, because they are you. He is afraid of mirrors. And this is an autoportrait.[/quote]
- Anonymous /x/phile

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The Murderer
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Both pictures, to the painter, happen briefly after their original counterparts. Two mental flaws occur.
1. The painter feels as he himself can create a reality by painting.
2: He, himself will eventually be consumed by his own creation.

In both paintings the painter has stepped into the painting. In one he is noticed, with the passengers staring at him; in the other, he is the white man in the water, hoping to be rescued. I feel that these pictures show the soul of a god-complex-ridden murderer who fears his creations will consume him.

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The Blind Spot
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All the content on the right half of the copy is recycled imagery from the left.

Kuplin suffered from not insanity but severe brain damage. He had a visual disorder- cortical blindness or unilateral neglect with anosognosia manifested as blindsight- which gave him a massive blind spot. He could not see any of the content right from the center of the painting. The copy only contains the same information from the left hand side of the painting, but seen from another angle. This explains the similarities between the first and third sleds.

Kuplin literally could not conceive of anything on the right hand side of his perspective. Were you to ask him to draw a clock, he would probably only give you the numbers 6 through 12, either all around the circle of the clock or trailing off at 6 and 12. The story would be much the same if you asked him to draw an upside-down clock, but the numbers would be 12 and 1 through 6.

He knew there is another half of the painting, but could not conceive of it, and so filled in the right hand side with the left hand side, seen from a new perspective. The dividing line is the 'crease' that appeared in a scan of the painting, which actually [i]was[/i] painted and not the result of folding pages. (Note that this theory, while interesting, fell apart as a result of the discovery of the uncreased image, above.)

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The Freudian Interpretation
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[url=https://farm1.staticflickr.com/100/312610343_54bfff3ce4_z.jpg?zz=1]The hill is a naked woman engaging in sexual intercourse.[/url]

http://akuplin.blogspot.com/
http://www.metafilter.com/56678/Russian-Psychoanalytic-Art-Mystery

Troika comparison:
[img]https://lh3.ggpht.com/_3nGffZHHd4E/RXcMJ7Bk7PI/AAAAAAAAAE0/Af8wH0clkEY/s1600/horses.jpg[/img]

All the people:
[img]https://lh3.ggpht.com/_3nGffZHHd4E/RXSgiYCNdcI/AAAAAAAAAEE/-vu4ILdbSyU/s1600/people.jpg[/img]

All objects removed:
[img]https://lh3.ggpht.com/_3nGffZHHd4E/RXPKwICNdQI/AAAAAAAAAB8/aMhFc973neM/s1600/nonothinek8.jpg[/img]

Other Kuplin painting for consideration:
[img]http://www.museum.ru/primitiv/catalog/KO_0001b.jpg[/img]
[i]Copy of [url=http://sch1262.ru/eproject/gallery/images/ayvaz/6-gallery.jpg]this painting[/url][/i]