[insert witty title]

I do like a good mystery. Recently I found a few blogs talking about this painting:


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The painting was originally posted on a russian language blog, here, and quickly translated to english here. I'm going to directly quote the english translation in describing what is going on:

* This was painted by a person with a rare and severe mental disorder. He was constantly seeing his own fantasies all around him. He also had a certain phobia (undisclosed).
* His (the poster’s) psychiatry professor showed this painting in a lecture, and said there was one tell-tale sign in it that showed the painter’s insanity.
* The professor didn’t say what that sign was, leaving the students to do the guesswork. The only clues he gave was, “don’t look for small details, look at the whole; if you figure out what the phobia was, you’ve got the answer; ask yourself what could have preceded this scene; think of what the place would look like with all the objects removed“.
* The professor said that during the 15 years of his teaching, only one student had figured it out.

I have no idea what is going on, but there are a lot of odd things about the painting. The right hand panel looks like it is painted from a different perspective than the left hand panel (houses and background people are rotated 90 degrees), perhaps indicative of some sort of disorder relating to spatial reasoning. None of the houses have doors (fear of being stuck in a wide open space). Groups of three everywhere (windows, people, sleighs), OCD?

Of course on the other hand the professor could be full of shit.

Or maybe what we read into the painting tells us about our own insecurities.