4.8

Professionally, Jay was an artist. Privately, he was a failure. There were images he saw in his brain that he wanted, desperately, to make. He scraped and crafted and ground and wiped and slid hot dry rough young cracking ugly portraits around his workshop to find the right light so he could see the layers of old paint flake off when he [turned] them to ribbons with a box cutter.
And at the end of every month, Jay would lay, splayed out quietly on the floor as seven or eight rich idiots would roll by with his agent to purchase the long strips of heavy canvas tacked to creaking stretchers. His agent would leave a check, and he would use the bulk of it to buy more paint.