300 Paintings – 04 February 2025

300 Paintings is a testament to the saying “art creates life creates art”… in the sense that “art creates mental illness creates art”. I never understood why people are so confused when they discover that their favorite artists, along with society’s most esteemed ones, are, in fact, struggling with diagnosed mental health challenges. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been in an art gallery and heard someone say, “wow, this is crazy!” and mean the artwork, not knowing that the artist has a congruent diagnosis. Really, “mental illness creates genius creates art creates mental illness creates genius.” After experiencing 300 Paintings, I will be adding Sam Kissajukian to all three lists: art, mental illness, genius.

One thing that distinguishes the diagnosed from the concerned is the ability to laugh at severe mental illness. I share a diagnosis with Sam, and I can’t even begin to express how beautifully healing it was to hear stand up comedy style jokes about what our lives are like, both internally and as seen by different factions of the rest of the world. I usually have to laugh to myself and by myself, and 300 Paintings did an absolutely brilliant job of simultaneously acknowledging the severity of bipolar disorder and poking fun at how the quirks of how people with bipolar disorder think and feel create incredible art (and incredible people). I’ve never seen a piece of theatre as dexterously able to hold that balance as 300 Paintings.

Sam Kissajukian mentioned somewhere towards the soft ending of the play that 300 Paintings is unscripted. He knows which stories he’s telling and in what order, but every night he feeds off of the audience energy and where he is in terms of state dependent memory to find the right words to express the journey of becoming a painter in a manic episode in an abandoned cake factory, sleeping in the oven and conquering the universe with a cavalcade of useless inventions that his charm and wit made almost sellable. That kind of raw sincerity is rare in the theatre world; it’s also an ideal way for a person with bipolar disorder to tell their story without slipping into an episode from the adrenaline (which turns to boredom) of doing the same thing, word-for-word, eight times a week for weeks. With 300 Paintings, Sam Kissajukian has invented, tested, and demonstrated an unscripted show as a reasonable accommodation for people living with bipolar disorder who want to work in the theatre industry. Though some may prefer consistency, the unscripted nature of 300 Paintings is what enables Sam to get this story to the wider audience it deserves.

Another thing that’s rarely expressed explicitly is that society rewards the unwell. Sam’s painting abilities were incredible from day 1. His inventions almost sold, multiple times. He kept the digital Pisscaso/MOM museum concept’s potential investor hooked for weeks with neither understanding where it was going. It’s funny, but it also reflects a flaw in our society—we like deep thinkers, big dreamers, and wild ideas, primarily because we seek to profit from them. What if this is the next thing to go viral and I turned it down? How sorry will I be?

Society capitalizes on the disconnect of people with serious mental illnesses as the uniqueness of our ideas could help them get rich quick, retire, lakehouse, boat, island, what have you. They reward the persistence of the mentally ill; they don’t acknowledge that it’s because we are unable to stop ourselves, working round the clock, starving our bodies and brains to finish “just one more thing” and then catching the hint of another idea and following it and cycling between able to function, extremely high functioning, and not able to function at all. Society only wants people who are functioning. It doesn’t notice the absence of people when we crash. The tragic part is that, as the person with mental illness, part of why we work ourselves in this way is because we feel that the broader world would not function without us. We find out in our depressive states how wrong we are, but then forget the next time we’re elevated. It’s profoundly sad to think about it that way. So Sam doesn’t.

Instead, Sam Kissajukian creates art that reaches people on every level. If you’re a visual thinker, the paintings displayed after the performance showing different stages of Sam’s bipolar disorder are spot on, as are the captions accompanying them. If you like to laugh, there’s a lot of humor in picturing someone sleeping in the oven of a cake factory as a way to inspire ideas. If you like absurdity, Sam has a wheelbarrow of pennies for you. If you see this as serious, sit back in your chair and think about the content of the stories Sam is telling as opposed to his affect while he tells them. He’s telling a story of someone who went mad and spent six months in an abandoned building with big ideas that made no money and no sense. If you have bipolar disorder, you’re in for a treat. You will see yourself in these stories. Test out a new potential date and see if they laugh in the right places—it’s way easier than trying to find the words to come out as bipolar yourself. As you walk from the show to the gallery, ask your date, “how would you like to date someone like that, eh?” If you see yourself in Sam Kissajulian’s 300 Paintings for the very first time, it’s okay. Help is available whenever you need it and people are more accepting than you might expect. They might even offer you a performance space or an art gallery. The only offer to be wary of is the abandoned cake factory!

I attended this performance on a press pass from The Press Room.