Usually Vincent can get a sip of water from a passing cloud by scooping through it with his cup. But it’s been a hot day and there are no clouds in sight. The last stretch of any great ordeal is always the toughest. But he thinks to himself “if it was easy, it wouldn’t be impressive”. His little paint brush runs hot. He’s almost done.

The sun sets and his work light is gone. He descends on his home-made elevator contraption. Which consist of the seat of a swing hooked up to a boat motor. It takes 30 minutes to return to the ground.

His house stands below in the shadow of the painting. He runs straight to his computer to send an email to Guinness World Records.

Dear Albert of Guinness World Records,

Tomorrow marks the beginning of the final month that I work on my 5000 meter tall painting. As we discussed in previous emails, I should warn you when I’m about to finish it so that your team can be in place to document and verify the validity of the record.

It’s been 22 long years. Looking forward to see you drop your jaws soon.

Sincerely,

- Vincent Finnigan

After rereading the email five times and after eating a quick spaghetti bolognaise microwave dish, he sends the email. Then he tries to fall asleep.

It’s 5 o’clock, three hours before his alarm goes off. But there’s no more sleep to be had. The first thing he does is check his emails. Nothing yet. He opens Twitter and likes a bunch of impressive art by artists he admire. Still no email. He opens this morning’s newspaper, on the first page of the culture section something makes him swallow his coffee wrong. The headline reads “Young artist break world record and new frontiers with 7500 meter wide painting”.

A new email appears in his inbox, it’s from Guinness World Records. It’s from his art fund.

Mr Vincent Finnigan,

Yesterday evening a young artist completed a painting which measure 7500 meters in width and 3000 meters in height. Your 5000 meter tall and 2500 meter wide painting is still not complete. Despite all the additional funds we have granted you.

Hereby we terminate our contract and will stop the transfer of any further funds your way. Sorry for the inconvenience.

Regards,

Artistic Supervision

Before freaking out, Vincent check his bank account. The current balance is 253 euro. He grabs a pen and paper to calculate how much it would take to finish the painting, he crumbles up the paper in frustration and throws it on the floor. The numbers don’t add up. He could buy a few more buckets of paint, but he would need about twice as much to finish the last stretch of the painting. But nobody would give a damn about the world’s second biggest painting. Neither does he. That’s not why he started painting it. It takes about 30 minutes to paint 1 square meter. Which meant he had spent about 12.487.500 hours up there in the air with his little paint brushes. In one morning all that effort had been turned into waste. Now he just had an impractically huge canvas taking up most of his property.

He went outside and screamed on the top of his lungs and threw his coffee mug straight through the painting.

Vincent starts looking for a job the next day. There are no art related jobs available in the area. After a couple of weeks he finds a job in an office, as an accountant. Aside from the fact that he can use a computer there’s nothing qualifying him for this job. But since there’s a shortage of accountants in the area they offer him training. To practice his newly acquired accounting skills he makes a spreadsheet to see what it would cost to finish and extend the painting to crack the new record. Let’s just say it’s a good thing he likes simple food such as fast noodles and Heinz beans.

In school he didn’t care particularly about grades, so he would just doodle in his math book. But now he needs to make ends meet and crunching numbers is the only way.

Every day he updates his spreadsheet to keep track of his goal. In total he needs another 120000 euro to afford brushes, buckets of paint and most difficult of all, to afford the extra construction material and cloth to extend the canvas. With his meager salary he can only put aside 200 euro per month. The current balance is 400 out of 120000 euro. Only 50 years to go.

After work he’s usually too exhausted to do anything artistic. On the rare occasions where he manages to pick up a pencil, all he can get out of it are bland doodles. Nothing gets his gears going.

One day during a long meeting he and his coworkers are bored, nearly to death. The boss presents the quarterly performance review in the driest way possible. It’s a running gag in the office that the boss could make even the most interesting topic seem boring. On a post it note Vincent draws the boss standing in an exploding volcano while saying “lava is on the rise”. One of his coworkers crack a smile at it and make another coworker peek at it. They giggle a bit between each other. A smile spreads across Vincent’s face too.

In the evening Vincent comes back home, flips his sketchbook open, grabs the pen and… can’t think of what to draw. There’s no boss to make fun of, no coworkers to amuse. He looks out the dark window, there’s nothing to see except for his own reflection. He puts the pen to the paper again and starts drawing lines despite not knowing where it’s heading. The same volcano from the meeting earlier takes shape. But below the volcano he draws his little house, lava is running towards it and a speech bubble from the house reads.

“I can’t think of what to draw!”

Something feels right. He takes a picture and shares it with his art-friends. They like it too.

The following day at work he finds his coworker repeatedly try to drink more coffee out of her long-since empty mug. He draw her repeatedly chugging empty coffee cups with some text above it.

“Coffee smell so good! You don’t even need to refill your cup, you can just drink the smell.”

Vincent gulps the rest of his water and drops the drawing off casually at the coworker’s desk. When he comes back with his glass of water, she’s proudly showing the drawing to the people sitting around them.

Vincent opens the spreadsheet he made for the big painting and think about all the material and time it would take to finish it. His coworkers are still joking and laughing about the doodle he made using a ballpoint pen on notebook paper.

When he comes home that day he goes straight into the kitchen for a scissor. He goes back out and hesitate in front of the enormous canvas. He felt like he should cut out a square from it and turn that into a tiny painting. The canvas could be turned into billions of paintings.

Instead he stabs the scissor into the canvas and run along the painting. Then he mounts the little elevator for the first time in a year. He rides up both sides of the canvas while holding the scissor firmly into it. At last he cuts the top. The little elevator chugs down in the sunset. He walks up to one of the corners of the canvas and start to fold it violently. He goes on all night. He punch it and stomp it to shape it into something resembling a giant crumbled piece of paper, like what you would find next to a trash can in the studio of a hard working artist.

The next day the garbage men find the giant crumbled canvas next to the artist’s trash can. It’s too big to fit in their truck. Soon everybody in town finds out what the artist did to his long anticipated masterpiece. A journalist from the local newspaper shows up at his door, Vincent invites him in. The journalist ask why he gave up on something he put so much time into.

“I made a mistake.”

Vincent said.

“What kind of mistake?”

The journalist asked.

“I could just have done this.”

Vincent grabs a napkin and scribbles on it quickly, then he holds it up to the journalist.

“What is it supposed to be? It doesn’t look like anything.”

Vincent crumble the napkin and throw it in a trash bin full of crumbled paper.

“I don’t know what it was supposed to be either.”