Mad Artist



""I do what other people only dream. I make art until someone dies. (giggles) I am the world's first fully-functioning homicidal artist. ""

- The Joker, Batman (1989 Film).

""All architects before me only knew how to build... create... only I am bold enough to destroy! Let's start... with that little school over there!""

- Mr. Mechanical, Freedom Force

The right-brain equivalent to the Mad Scientist and Mad Doctor. May work in any medium, but the subject is almost always evil. He may make statues by dipping live people in concrete (or wax), he may redecorate other people's houses with explosives, he may try to get the perfect ending to his murder mystery novel by starting a real murder mystery. The unifying thread is that he always sees a few incidental deaths as meaningless compared to the eternal majesty of his masterpieces.

Mad performance artists, singers, actors, and the like do outrageous and sociopathic things in public either as art, or so that people will pay attention to their art.

This character's motivation and descent into madness may be similar to his scientist counterpart, caused by a shunning from the community or a dismissal of his work as too crazy or unorthodox.

The Mad Artist is somewhat rarer a trope than the Mad Scientist since, while Science Is Bad, art is almost always good, or at least benign (even if it is angsty or incomprehensible). Some characters actually embody both tropes at once, using super science to fuel their mad artistic vision. While a Mad Scientist can be one of the good guys, you'll practically never see a Mad Artist so venerated -- to escalate into Mad Artistry, the artist must usually break too sacred a taboo (eg. murder or torture) to be an acceptable good guy.

Somewhat Truth in Television, as seen by the many artists of various kinds with mental problems, such as Vincent Van Gogh (who produced much of his art from an insane asylum, although his best work was done when he was most sane) and Virginia Woolf (who committed suicide). However, most Real Life Mad Artists aren't violent -- they're much more likely to be Angsty. This is sometimes misrepresented as a sort of Strawman Political by people who view all modern fine artists as amoral and talentless charlatans and degraders of culture: there are more than a few stories of this kind in which art critics and other artists are represented as genuinely supporting "art" involving actual murder or similar depravity, despite the lack of any real-world precedent or plausibility for it.

Anime & Manga

 * The Weiss Kreuz series is full of these: the musician whose music drives people crazy, the dollmaker who uses human skin in his creations, and a whole cult that revolves around using the body parts of women in artistic arrangements... among others.
 * Deidara from Naruto makes frequent references to his "explosive" art, even affirming once in the manga that he doesn't do pop-art, he does superflat.
 * His partner Sasori also counts; it is mentioned that Deidara looks up to Sasori as a fellow artist. He specializes in creating puppets, . He and Deidara often argue about whether art is supposed to be fleeting and transient (like Deidara's exploding sculptures) or eternal (like Sasori's puppets).
 * Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service based one chapter around a former embalmer who went insane, and in the process concluded that artwork aimed at the soul was meaningless; true art, in his view, was based in flesh. He took up a job as a hairstylist and offered women he found attractive a "special cut". If they accepted, he chloroformed them, cut off several of their limbs, and waited for them to wake up. Once they did (and panicked at their maiming), he cut off their heads and assembled a new body using random corpse parts; the resulting patchwork corpses were his "masterpieces".
 * Vampire Princess Miyu fought one of these in the second episode - the shinma Roh-Sha, who sought to eternally capture the beauty of women, by freezing them in time and dressing them up. The fact that the women apparently remained completely conscious of their paralyzed plight, just added to the sheer madness of his 'gallery', as their muted whimpering resounded through the dark halls...
 * MPD Psycho features a serial killer architect who employs "human planters" to perfect the landscaping around the buildings he designs. He literally grows plants inside the brains of girls he kidnaps, then plants the whole body, with the plant growing out of the top of the head.
 * The cast of Princess Tutu is subject to the whims of a writer named Drosselmeyer, who has the power to make what he writes become reality and is obsessed with tragedy -- even if the characters he's putting through trial after trial are real people.
 * Mr. 3, high-ranking member of Baroque Works from One Piece, had the ability to emit wax from his body and used it to entrap victims in interesting poses in the name of art. Similarly, his partner, Miss Goldenweek, would then paint the resulting statues. She also used her paints to create "color traps" in order to emotionally control and manipulate victims.
 * In Rosario to Vampire, the art teacher is secretly a medusa, and essentially seduces girls into stripping down and posing pretty before turning them to stone. Much like one of the above examples, this is especially creepy because they're clearly still conscious... Tsukune realizes something is wrong when he notices one of them crying.
 * Ena of Shikabane Hime was a mentally unstable portrait painter in life; in death, he exists only to create incredible beauty. Pity he's utterly deranged about it.
 * Any time Hideshi Hino "hosts" one of his semi-autobiographical manga stories. The titular Panorama of Hell (as well as the rest of his paintings) is painted with the artist's own blood while his inspiration comes from the refuse and bloated animal (and occasionally human) corpses in the nextdoor River of Hell. While Hino's real life childhood probably wasn't as bad as described (for instance, it's doubtful his grandmother actually became a chicken), it obviously wasn't very nice either.
 * Marchello Orlando of Le Portrait De Petit Cossette murders his young fiance in order to eternally preserve her youthful beauty (and her family, too, just because).
 * D.N.Angel: The whole alter-ego thing STARTED because of  It is stated that the Hikari ancestors were mentally unstable to begin with, creating dangerous art pieces such as
 * Eiji Kise of Psyren sees himself as an artist. Everyone else sees him as an insane killer.
 * Rurouni Kenshin -  sees himself as an artist. Everyone else (including the people he was allied with) consider him creepy.
 * Jake Martinez in Tiger and Bunny. While in prison, he paints a huge mural of a skull made from a forest scene on the wall of his cell.
 * from Mawaru Penguindrum. His creations were seemingly normal (save for ), but he was so obsessed with beauty and aesthetics that
 * Afterschool Charisma has Mozart's clone. He believes that as a clone, he's a genius, but the pressure of living up to the original is too much.
 * In One Piece, we have Mr. 3, a sculptor who has wax-based powers and uses them to encase people to make into his statues; and his partner in crime Ms. Goldenweek, an illustrator who has developed a type of paint that manipulates emotions and effectively uses it as mind control. While the two of them, want to eliminate their targets in the most stylish way they can, them being artists, they (or at least Mr. 3) are cunning enough to have been promoted in their organization above physically superior fighters.
 * In One Piece, we have Mr. 3, a sculptor who has wax-based powers and uses them to encase people to make into his statues; and his partner in crime Ms. Goldenweek, an illustrator who has developed a type of paint that manipulates emotions and effectively uses it as mind control. While the two of them, want to eliminate their targets in the most stylish way they can, them being artists, they (or at least Mr. 3) are cunning enough to have been promoted in their organization above physically superior fighters.

Comic Books

 * The Joker, to varying degrees in one Batman adaptation or another. The comic version definitely is, if stand-up comedy is considered "art", as his constant goal is to make people laugh as he kills them.
 * In the Tim Burton movie he describes himself as a homicidal artist. He shows a perverse delight in Vicki Vale's graphic war photos, telling her that she gives it all such a glow. She is definitely not appreciative of the "living work of art" that he shows off to her (Alicia, Jack Napier's girlfriend, who has been physically and emotionally scarred such that she has to wear a mask as a result of what the Joker did to her).
 * His minions join in, splattering paint on works of art in a museum gallery and otherwise being creatively destructive. The Dragon even takes this a step further, slashing open canvases with a sword - until the Joker stops him, admitting that he "kind of likes" one of the paintings. The premise is so absurd that it's hard to tell if the Joker truly believes that he and his men are "improving" the artistic pieces or if he just wants to destroy everything in sight out of bitterness at his own disfigurement.
 * Arkham Asylum Living Hell includes mad graffiti artist Doodlebug, who makes his paint from human blood, which he uses as part of a long-running plot to
 * In The DCU, Thanagarian artists often complete their "life's work" by killing themselves and a lot of innocent people with them.
 * The titular character from Johnny the Homicidal Maniac is implied to have once been a rather talented artist who lost his creativity, and subsequently went completely insane.
 * Nail Bunny actually implies that Johnny was messed up before losing his ability, and still did horrible things to people, but for different reasons.
 * There's also Jhonen Vasquez, the creator of Johnny. While not nearly as psychotic as his creation, he does have hypnophobia, and throws around terms such as "Moose", "Meat", and "Chihuahua" in his creations. Of course, there's also the matter of what he has created
 * Arthur "Art Dekko" Dekker from Zot goes crazy as his body is replaced with robotic components, with his artistic vision crossing the line into outright hallucination.
 * Grant Morrison's run on Doom Patrol includes several Mad Artists. The Hangman's Beautiful Daughter, one of Crazy Jane's 64 personalities, creates living paintings. The Brotherhood of Dada isn't so much a team of villains as a troupe of anarchistic performance artists, which leads to their quest for The Painting That Ate Paris.
 * In Grant Morrison's Animal Man run, one story had an alien artist from Hawkman's world, who created an orb that displayed psychic images from his life. The psychic output is strong enough to threaten the world.
 * Then there's King Mob's gang in The Invisibles (also by Grant Morrison)
 * Ironically the character who flirted most closely with true insanity was Ragged Robin: whose contributions to KM's cell rarely involved a body count, and whose influence helped convince King Mob to dial down his (always ambivalent) urge toward gunplay and mayhem.
 * And don't forget Professor Pyg. Oh, God, Professor Pyg.
 * "I'm an artist! I can't be expected to work on antipsychotics!"
 * "I like to work to music. Sexy disco hot."
 * Gilded Lily, in Alpha Flight, married men and turned them into gold statues.
 * The Swedish comic James Hund featured an art critic serial killer; he kills people he thinks produces worthless "pseudo-art" by means reflecting their work - so for instance, a man that makes wooden sculptures then saws them apart is, well... They set a trap for him by portraying a man as a "neo-brutalist" who creates paintings by shooting intestines with a shotgun at canvas. Alone. At night. On top of a deserted building...
 * The Orchestra Verdammten in The Umbrella Academy: Apocalypse Suite.
 * In one encounter, Usagi runs across a villain with an ink set that can bring to life anything drawn with it. Particularly vicious, because the ink is made from . Used for Shout Outs to various Kaiju, such as Mothra, Daimajin, and, of course, Godzilla.
 * The unfinished last Tintin (Comic Book) book, Tintin and Alph-Art, would have had Tintin encountering the modern art scene and becoming the focal point of one of these.
 * Shade the Changing Man
 * One of the Lights in Generation Hope is Kenji Uedo, a young, acclaimed Japanese artist. He considers his special ability a true art form.
 * Lisa Molinari, a.k.a. Coat of Arms, creates her own version of the Young Avengers as an art project examining the nature of superheroism. Lisa is a True Neutral person whose only interest in superheroism is artistic. Besides herself, this team included two genuinely good people, a Punisher wannabe, a size-changing neo-Nazi, and a robot that said neo-Nazi reprograms to have views similar to her own. She is also a fan of Norman Osborn.
 * Steve Ditko did a The Question story about a charlatan modern artist who hated uplifting and high-quality historic artworks, who dressed up as one of his own ugly, sludgy-looking sculptures to become an art-vandalising supervillain.

Film
""I can look at a guy like Mick Jagger, and see a pillbug that can fart the Blue Danube!""
 * The protagonist of Close Encounters of the Third Kind obsessively builds more and more elaborate sculptures of a mysterious mountain as the rest of his life falls apart.
 * The villain in Freaked manages to combine this and For Science!. He uses his "TastyFreekz Machine" to create concoctions that horribly (and ridiculously) mutate people, because he sees it as an art form.

""I feel like I'm taking crazy pills!""
 * In House of 1,000 Corpses, Otis B. Driftwood uses his abductees' bodies to make tableau-sculptures. And rants impressively at them about being an Artist in Torment.
 * In Kick-Ass, the Anti-Hero Big Daddy could be considered one. In the apartment where he and Hit Girl live, one of the walls is covered in comic-book villain style pictures of the Big Bad. His obsession with vengeance is not unwarranted, as the man had framed Big Daddy as a drug dealer, putting him in jail for 5 years, which drove his pregnant wife to suicide.
 * Lukey, the eccentric and violent artist from the concluding parts of Odd Man Out (1943) is an alcoholic version of this trope, creating religious-styled paintings of tortured souls with bulging eyes and setting them on fire when he's unhappy with them. Ultimately he tries to paint the film's protagonist, who is dying from gunshot wounds, as he sits bleeding to death, to get a glimpse into the "human soul". And fails.
 * In the film A Double Life, the lead character (a noted stage actor) gets so far into the characters he plays that his whole day-to-day personality is overwritten. This is bad news when he plays Othello.
 * The film Stranger Than Fiction plays with this, and splits it into two parts. Karen Eiffel, the author, isn't aware that the protagonist of her tragedy is going to die in real life, but she certainly acts a bit Mad, loitering in the emergency room of a hospital and complaining that nobody's dying; another character who's a fan of hers fits the "sees life as incidental next to Art" bit, advising the hero not to try to avert his doom because it makes such a good story.
 * Jean-Baptiste Grenouille in Perfume has a superhuman sense of smell, but no scent of his own. Believing that "the soul of beings is their scent," he decides to create the perfect perfume by capturing and combining the scents of beautiful young women. It turns out that he must kill the women in order to capture their scent, turning his artistic quest into a murder spree.
 * Fashion designers are portrayed this way so often it could be an entire subtrope. A prime example would be Will Ferrell's magnificently over-the-top Mugatu, from Zoolander--who, ironically, seems to be an Only Sane Man in that he realizes Zoolander only has one look.

""My art... keeps me sane. Art. Sane.""
 * Another example of the fashion designer variety: Cruella DeVille from 101 Dalmatians thought that designing and wearing a coat made of a hundred dead puppies would be absolutely fabulous.
 * Inverted by Self Made Orphan Benjamin Pierce in Scanners:


 * The Truman Show's Christof is far more concerned about his reputation as an artistic boundary-pushing genius director than about the ethics of never letting someone know that his entire life is televised for the world's entertainment.
 * In Secret Window..
 * The main character in Roger Corman's Bucket Of Blood gains recognition in the Beatnik art community with a dead cat covered in clay. He works his way up from there...
 * Antonio, the brilliant flamenco dancer and choreographer in Carlos Saura's Carmen, becomes obsessed with the young woman dancing the lead in his new production, Carmen. Her name? Carmen. Let's just say that Life Imitates Art.
 * Evelyn from The Shape of Things:


 * Cecil B Demented and the Sprocket Holes.
 * Jimmy in Art School Confidential.
 * Irving Wallace, the killer in the Slasher Film Stage Fright Aquarius is hinted to be one. After disposing everyone in theater (except the Final Girl, whom he somehow forgot), he starts organizing the bodies into a bizarre display. After he is done, he sits down in the middle of it and starts stroking the local caretaker's cat.
 * Michael Myers also seems to occasionally "admire" how he kills, and displays, his victims.
 * The film A Bucket of Blood features an artist who turns his victims into statues.

Literature
""Did you design that room? It's very handsome. You're a great artist, Erik."
 * Boday from Jack Chalker's series "Riders Of The Wind", who turns girls into living pieces of art for the rich clients. It's somewhat a stretch to call her evil (she travels with the main characters, and becomes more of a good character by the end of the series), but she's still quite insane (third-person speaking included).
 * David Wingrove's Chung Kuo series of novels has Ben Sheppard, a schizophrenic genius who straddles the line between For Science! and For Art. He throws himself into improving his new virtual reality artistic medium while civilization is tearing itself apart, sees a bandit raid as a chance to improve his artistic skills by observing their slaughter, and openly scoffs at the idealistic goals of his more outward-looking counterpart Kim Ward.
 * In Susan Cooper's young-adult fantasy novel Greenwitch, the unnamed villain is a painter who produces brilliant but evil art. It is even described at one point as being 'twisted but good', implying a clear talent even as it disturbs the viewer.
 * Since his paintings can literally be used to cast spells, an 'old method' which Merriman notes he had forgotten existed, that makes this one of the few literal examples of Dark Arts. Some of this originality, though, may be undermined by the painter in question living in a Gypsy caravan which apparently is a mark of his actual racial heritage. (He even attempts to use the grail--no, not that grail, though it is 'made after the fashion of' it -- as a scrying device.)
 * The MacGuffin in Robert Asprin's novel Myth Directions is a hideous metal toad sculpture, the last piece done by a sculptor named Watgit "before" he went mad.
 * The Discworld story Thud! features the mad artist Methodia Rascal, painter of "The Battle of Koom Valley", who spent the last few years of his life thinking he was being pursued by a giant chicken.
 * Or that he was a giant chicken. He appears to have tried talking in Chicken, and even wrote some of his diary-like notes partly in Chicken.
 * Or possibly both. He was a Mad Artist after all. If you can't handle the idea of being afraid of a giant chicken and actually being the giant chicken you have no business appearing in this trope.
 * Owlswick Jenkins from Making Money forged stamps because he liked the delicate details they had, but was prosecuted..
 * He was really impressed by the way the forged stamps actually had more detail than the printing process on the real stamps was capable of.
 * Optus Warhole, in Enki Bilal's trente-deux décembre. His ?compression de mort éructée? happening uses the bodies of soldiers killed at war, and ends in slaughter.
 * The Phantom of the Opera is a mad musician, composing music and teaching Christine how to sing.
 * In the original book from Gaston Leraux, the Phantom, between his many talents also is a great architect, the world’s best ventriloquist and Torture Technician.
 * In the original book from Gaston Leraux, the Phantom, between his many talents also is a great architect, the world’s best ventriloquist and Torture Technician.

"Yes, a great artist, in my own line.""

"It's far from clear why he keeps writing poetry. Has the villain pissed on his father's ashes? Or disturbed the grim site of a lightning strike? Anyway, he's raving, and his harsh readings put learned and unlearned alike to flight, like a bear that's broken the bars of his cage. If he catches anyone, he holds on and kills him with reading. He's a real leech that won't let go of the skin till it's full of blood."
 * Subverted in the second Skulduggery Pleasant book. There is a wizard who considers himself to be redefining murder as an art form. The only problem is that his descriptions are rather childish, and he hasn't actually killed anyone (and is overall quite inept).
 * Richard Pickman from HP Lovecraft's Pickman's Model. He's an artist who is obsessed with painting grotesque pictures, and can produce extremely lifelike and frightening portraits of inhuman monsters.
 * Also Erich Zann from The Music of Erich Zann, who certainly seems somewhat crazy. He spends most of his time locked up in his appartment, playing his cello, and doesn't let anybody else hear him play. He does that because he believes that his music is the only thing that keeps Eldritch Abominations from entering our dimension through his bedroom window. This being Lovecraft, he turns out to be right.
 * Not to mention Cthulhu himself induces mad artistry around the world when the stars are right for his rising.
 * The Weaver, from Perdido Street Station, whose eternal goal is to increase the aesthetics of the universe. It lives off the appreciation of beauty and has god-level powers so that it can make the "world-weave" ever closer to its ideal of beauty. However, said beauty is incomprehensible by humans.
 * The Lamb, from Mervyn Peake's short story Boy In Darkness, who uses Psychic Powers to change people, physically and mentally into half-person, half-animal...creatures for the sake of art.
 * One of Dorothy L Sayers' Peter Wimsey stories, "The Man With the Copper Fingers," featured a sculptor who disposed of
 * Caster and his new buddy Ryuunosuke in Fate Zero. Sometimes they artistically murder people, but the cake winner for squick has to be the giant cavern filled with people who had their organs turned into musical instruments. There's an organ made on squeezing intestine sections for the screams of the victim. Rider notes that a lot of them are still alive... technically. He fixes that.
 * The villain in Dexter By Design. To a degree, in the TV show.
 * Carol O'Connell's novel Killing Critics.
 * Possibly the original namer for this trope, Horace gives this description of the "Mad Poet" in the Ars Poetica, making this trope Older than Feudalism.


 * From JRR Tolkien's The Silmarillion: Fëanor probably falls somewhere between this and Mad Scientist, being an incredibly talented craftsman who becomes more or less insane after his greatest works are stolen (though he was already slightly unhinged due to a particularly bad case of Missing Mom.) His son Maglor definitely falls into this: he's a Warrior Poet who commits atrocities and ends up wandering along the seasore singing laments.
 * Maglor was probably the least mad of Feanor's sons - he was mostly convinced to commit the atrocities by his brothers and deeply regrets all he's done (hence the laments). Some versions of Daeron might fit better.
 * From Dean Koontz' Relentless, we have Shearman Waxx...a book critic obsessed with destroying any writer who dares veer away from the postmodern, deconstructionist philosophy... to the point that, should they keep writing after he trashes them in a review, he will  As it turns out, he is  Subverted in the fact that, as a writer, Waxx himself is an abysmal hack, using boilerplate quotes and recycled turns of phrase in all his reviews.
 * Someone has issues.
 * Navarth from The Demon Princes saga is referred to as "the Mad Poet," though his works are well-known and fashionable.
 * In The Gargoyle, Marianne Engel carves her grotesques with a manic obsession, eschewing food and sleep for days and days on end, leading to repeated hospitalizations and commitments. She believes that she is
 * She is portrayed as a definite 'good guy', as she's the narrator's love interest and the one who not only helps him after he's been burned to near death, get over his raging ego and get him off his drugs.
 * One of the major signs that society has completely screwed itself over in Otherland is that serial killers are revered as "forced involvement artists." (A subplot involves a less murderous artist calling a serial killer a hack for making art of others' deaths rather than his own, and challenging him to a dual suicide, to be judged by posterity.
 * Erasmus of the Dune series is a robot independent of Big Bad Omnius whose job is to understand human behavior. In studying art, he has murdered human slaves and used their parts as subjects of paintings.

Live Action TV
"Trin-E: I think he'd look good with a dog's head.
 * Doctor Who: "Bad Wolf", already a parody of reality TV, had a futuristic version of What Not To Wear hosted by two robots with, er... unconventional fashion ideas.

Zu-Zana: Or maybe no head at all! That would be so outrageous.

Trin-E: And then we could stitch your legs to the middle of your chest.

Zu-Zana: Nothing is too extreme."


 * The remake of Randall and Hopkirk Deceased had Gordon Stylus. Making sculptures out of frozen urine is actually among the saner things he does; by the end of the episode, he's murdered both his wife and Marty Hopkirk, tries to kill Jeff by dunking him in resin, and is seen wearing his wife's wedding dress and wielding a chainsaw.
 * Parodied in Spaced -- on first appearances, Brian Topp seems to be the kind of weird, creepy and intensely psycho artist who ends up making art out of people's skins, but he's actually completely harmless and quite normal (relatively speaking, that is); he's actually just incredibly shy, rather pretentious, and somewhat angsty for reasons that are never quite explained.
 * Actually they did explain, it is because he saw his dog ran over as a child. "Such vibrant colors..."
 * Several characters played by Julian Barrett, including Julian from Asylum and Howard from The Mighty Boosh. The above mentioned Brian Topp of Spaced was originally written for Barrett.
 * In The Adventures of Sinbad, Sinbad and his crew encounter a sculptor with a lot of female statues, which Sinbad notes on the lack of any seeming tool marks. Turns out the "sculptor" had a magic glove that turned anything he touch to marble and had been using girls that he lured into his mansion to become his "art" after sedating them. The only way to free the girls? Sinbad turns glove onto its user.
 * One episode of CSI revolved around a serial murderer who killed people and used rigor mortis to pose them in the poses of his sketches, then placed them around the city.
 * The episode "The Execution of Catherine Willows" introduces a serial killer who kills once every 15 years, and later is revealed to make details drawings of his victims just before he kills them.
 * The Great Gonzo from the Muppet Show. Not evil like many other examples, but definitely crazy.
 * I want to know what goes on between Gonzo and all those chickens, when the camera isn't on.
 * Criminal Minds has the killer in "True Night", a comic book artist who is basing his art on his murders. He's arguably a subversion though, as he doesn't even realise he's been killing; he's on a psychotic break and has lost a lot of his grasp on reality.
 * Not knowing what's real certainly sounds like madness. It may not be the standard version, but it works.
 * I meant that he was a subversion because he was basing his art on his murders subconsciously, whereas most of the other examples do it deliberately.
 * The character James Franco plays in his reoccurring guest role on the soap opera General Hospital fits this. The character, nicknamed Franco, is a artist, sociopath and serial killer who artistically depicts crime scene reenactments and is obsessed with murder and death as an art form.
 * The second season opener of the anthology series The Hunger ("Sanctuary") has Julian Priest (David Bowie), whose fascination with/resentment of death manifested itself in increasingly grisly and shocking performance art -- one piece had him surgically strip away a large piece of skin from his lower arm -- that led to outrage and shunning. Encountering a young man on the run for the murder of Julian's agent, he decides he'd make the perfect subject for his next work...the madness runs so deep that  Julian goes on to host the rest of the series. (This is not Bowie's first encounter with this trope -- see Music below.)
 * In Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel, Angelus believed that killing and torturing (and evil, in general) should be an artform. He is known to be the most vicious vampire ever recorded in the history of the Buffyverse.
 * One Law and Order Criminal Intent episode had an artist who killed women and sketched them as a way to deal with his feelings about the women who'd abused him his whole life. Goren eventually catches him by.
 * One Zodiart in Kamen Rider Fourze is a painter who is making a drawing of Mt. Fuji as a Christmas gift for a class of young children. Unfortunately, he attacks and turns to stone anyone who breaks his concentration, even damaging a building because he thinks it's disrupting his view.
 * On Season 1 of Dexter, the Big Bad Ice Truck Killer would display the neat, bloodless body parts of his victims in an artistic manner that wins Dexter's admiration. Vince would later compare the Ice Truck Killer to an artist.
 * In Season 2, Lila is an eccentric artist who works with items that she steals.
 * The X Files featured a Mad Artist or two, most notably the episode, Grotesque, in which a sculptor, became possessed by a desire to kill people and encase their bodies in clay gargoyle sculptures.
 * There are at least a couple of Tales From the Crypt episodes centered around Mad Artists. One of them was about an artist who killed people and used their blood in his paintings and another featured a young female artist (whose work bordered on the grotesque) killing her sugar daddy husband and turning him into soap.

Music

 * The plot of David Bowie's 1. Outside album is apparently about a Mad Artist kidnapping and murdering a colleague as a work of art.
 * Not a colleague, but the adopted child of said colleague. However, she could only have adopted that child because she killed her biological mother several years before - apparently.
 * Originally intended as the beginning of a concept-album trilogy -- a murder mystery involving a serial killer artist, and told in a non-linear style.
 * In Alesana's album The Emptiness, the Artist is messed up in so many ways, and it bleeds through into his art.

Tabletop Games
": This determination to push the horizons of art for art's sake ultimately explains the rare occurrence of reigar. Simply put, they went a bit too far.
 * In Vampire: The Masquerade, the Nosferatu clanbook mentioned some of them making an art out of killing, intentionally employing tropes from slasher movies when stalking their victims.
 * The Tzimisce are quite fond of doing this by using their unique talent of Fleshcrafting to "improve" both themselves and their victims.
 * The Toreador antitribu of the Sabbat follow a similar path. Like their cousins in the Camarilla, they're absolutely fascinated by beauty and defined by art... it's just, their definition of "beauty" and "art" has been altered to include "a masterfully executed flaying."
 * Vampire: The Requiem has the Architects of the Monolith, a bloodline of the Ventrue who believe in Geometric Magic and think cities have power. Combine the general tendency of the Ventrue to go cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs under mounting odds with blood sorcery that allows them to draw strength from the city, and...
 * In Dungeons and Dragons some races, especially non-humanoid, have whole disturbing forms of art. E.g. one supplement described beholders' art -- unsurprisingly, visual and Eye Beams-based: disintegration-carved stone sculptures and installations of petrified victims in various expressive poses. And sometimes one is combined with the other.
 * Spelljammer has Reigar who combine this with elements of Parody Sue and Mad Scientist. They are more nice people than not, but...

Teldin: A bit too --


 * They blew up their homeworld. And that is another issue. If the reigar were to gain control of the Spelljammer, they would regard the ship as little more than a base for artistic experiments. Given the reigar's penchant for excess, it is an appalling prospect."


 * Followers of Slaanesh in Warhammer and Warhammer 40000 exhibit shades of this at the least, and prefer to go the horror route in subject matter and medium.
 * There's also an alien species mentioned in the background that has this as their hat. They consider everything, including war, as an artform. As a result, they tend to go to battle wearing brightly coloured armour with weapons shooting technicolour deathrays and have battle plans designed to create the most artistic result, even if it would mean that they would lose.
 * And John Blanche, the chief artist for Games Workshop, is honestly, truly, fucked in the head.
 * Any Big Screwed-Up Family worth its salt should provide examples of almost any trope with "mad" in its title. The Whateleys in Deadlands are no exception. Basil Whateley is a painter, a painter of scenes both mundane and surreal. He can even paint your portrait for you! In fact, if he paints it well enough,
 * A couple of Mutants and Masterminds villains also qualify, most notably Fear-Master and the Maestro.

Video Games
""I want to take the ears off, but I can't.
 * Brauner from Castlevania: Portrait of Ruin. In a sense, the point of the whole game.
 * Sander Cohen, the radio and stage personality and spliced-out freak from Bio Shock who lurks in Fort Frolic. He apparently went from writing propaganda for Andrew Ryan to gems like forcing a man to play a piano rigged with explosives, turning people into plaster sculptures, and forcing the player to kill four of his disciples-turned-rivals and take photos of their corpses. His madness may not stem from his art, but they definitely run together at the time of the game.

I hop, and when I hop, I never get off the ground.

It's my curse, my eternal curse!

I want to take the ears off but I can't!

It's my curse! It's my fucking curse!

I want to take the ears off! Please! Take them off! Please!""

- The Wild Bunny, by Sander Cohen

"Steinman: I try to make them beautiful, but they always turn out wrong! This one - too fat! That one - too tall! This one - too symmetrical!"
 * The game also features Dr. Steinman, a plastic surgeon who went crazy from ADAM abuse and started to fancy himself "Surgery's Picasso". Keep in mind that he's referring to technique, as well as level of genius.

"Mr. Mechanical: All architects before me only knew how to build...create...only I'm bold enough to destroy!"
 * Don Octavio of the third Sly Cooper is a mad opera singer turned mob boss.
 * You can say the same story with Dimitri--though he was a painter turned forger.
 * When you first meet Kent in Dead Rising, he's merely an egotist photographer who challenges Frank to take specific pictures of him. The second time you meet him, he demands an "erotic" photo, showing a bad side. By the third time you meet him, he's clearly lost his mind, and is preparing to hand over an innocent human to a zombie so that he can photograph the moment of zombie transformation. At this point, Frank interrupts and attacks him (appropriately enough, he's a boss fight - bosses in Dead Rising are called "Psychopaths"). Kent's last request is that you photograph his corpse.
 * Vincent Van Gore from Luigi's Mansion would likely count under this (as well as Art Initiates Life). An obvious parody of Van Gogh, he's apparently never sold a painting in his lifetime, kept painting long after death and brought numerous ghosts to life from the artwork in his studio. And set about 30 of them on Luigi, mook rush style. Funny enough, he's painting the key you get from defeating him when you actually fight him.
 * Mr. Mechanical from Freedom Force. Though at first glance he may look like your average Mad Scientist villain, he is actually a disgraced architect (real name Clyde DeWitt) who was laughed out of the profession after one of his avant-garde buildings collapsed a week after it was unveiled. Insisting the building was sabotaged by petty and inferior minds, jealous and incapable of appreciating his works, he unleashes an army of giant robots (apparently designed by him with the help of Big Bad Timemaster) to destroy the city and its "hideous designs". And when the heroes defeat those, he jumps in an even BIGGER robot and goes on a rampage trying to destroy schools and hospitals while blathering on how he's superior to Gropius and Frank Lloyd Wright. He's quite entertaining.


 * Illbleed has Michael Reynolds, a horror movie director who apparently though the only fitting tribute to his work was a booby-trapped, monster-infested Amusement Park of Doom.
 * The Maestro from City of Heroes - a famed singer who lost his voice, went crazy, and was offered a new voice by The Council. His new voice will Break Your Bones. By the time you meet him, he's a boss-class supervillain who uses sonic attacks and complains about you interrupting his 'symphony'.
 * Many players of Dwarf Fortress take on this sort of role during megaprojects or killing sprees.
 * Many dwarves themselves go temporarily insane in "strange moods" and create a masterwork sword (or statue, or bed, or earring, or ballista component, or...) that is covered in decorative images and menaces with spikes of several different materials, including rubies and silk. The darkest kind of mood involves them butchering another dwarf and making a suit out of his skin. To be fair, it's a really nice suit.
 * From the popular LP of this game, Boatmurdered, Sankis becomes one of these after retiring as overseer of the fortress, making engravings about various things that had been happening around the fortress, including elephants killing dwarves, burning goblins, cheese, and homages to other images of cheese.
 * Reijek Hidesman, the serial-killing tanner in Baldurs Gate 2, talks about how his work has only one place to go, ending in a coat of human skin that can be converted into really, really creepy leather armour with silver dragon blood.
 * The second killer in Kara no Shoujo cuts girls up because he feels he needs their bodies in order to make some 'art.'
 * Fatman from Metal Gear Solid 2 is a Mad Bomber who thinks of himself as an artist.

Webcomics
"Blunt: Some months back. A robot named Qwerty. Wrote the first. Of his epic. Rap yodeling. Operas. It is then. I knew. Conflict between the two. Was inevitable."
 * Xxxyyy, an artist in the far future setting of Starslip Crisis, tries to put forth her post-post-postmodern views on art, by a performance piece. That involves blowing up the battleship/art museum on which the comic strip is set.
 * Other highlights include a collage made from wings of an endangered (now extinct) species of bat, a design where she walked into a restaurant and punched people, a painting that was actually an earlier painting of hers (thus making it even more profound) and, as a display of her genius, spontaneously crafted an extensive tableau out of Vanderbeam's pure and unadulterated fear.
 * Subverted in that she's trying to get people to call her out as an attention-seeking hack. She tried it on the wrong ship.
 * Jhonen Vasquez Rikk Estoban in Sam and Fuzzy. Played mostly for comedy.
 * Last Resort features Geisha, an inept medusa-esque sculptor who figured out that the critics loved his work MUCH more when he kidnapped and petrified people vs. actually bothering to sculpt.
 * Calamities of Nature discusses how artists may use their art as a form a psychological therapy, naturally explaining why mad artists are so ubiquitous.
 * Robot art in Freefall consists mostly of things humans would be unlikely to do. As in, Orbital bombardment in D minor. And something much more disturbing. But they don't want to shirk the work -- see their Making Swan Lake ballet. Of course, there's also this:

"I AM GOING TO MOTHERFUCKING KILL ALL YOU MOTHERFUCKERS.
 * from Homestuck, as of the latest update.

and paint the wicked pictures with your motherfuckin blood.

FROM YOUR VEINS WILL DRIP MY MIRACLES.

your crushed bones will make my special stardust."


 * Actually a subversion. He's, and spent the majority of the story . Or maybe he was just always insane and that just kept him functionally insane.

Web Original

 * SCP Foundation:
 * The creators of SCP-804.
 * The Gallery of Henri Beauchamp.
 * Are We Cool Yet?, a group of "art terrorists".
 * The Princess 99: Eulalie, a character whose present twice in the paperback version (and only once in the online version) is an Inkwitch who can make her painted creations come to life. She's also batshit, though its justified since she's spent most of her life in an insane asylum.
 * Dark General Argon in Sailor Nothing, foreshadowed throughout and horrifically revealed in his Moral Event Horizon moment.
 * Sarah Atwell of Survival of the Fittest. Originally just a typical pretentious film student, once she winds up on the island, she loses her grip on reality. Then things get creepy. There's also Madeline Harris of the Program, who, now that she has started to play the game, has been filling the gallery in her mind with sculptures of the people she's killed.
 * this Youtube video.

Western Animation

 * The Music Meister from Batman the Brave And The Bold. A choir student who discovered that he was capable of singing at a pitch that hypnotically controls peoples' actions. He grew up, using this power to command people into doing crime for him. His episode has him attempting to use a satellite to project his song around the entire world, enslaving the world's populace into A: becoming one gigantic musical under his command, and B: stealing for him.
 * Splatter Phoenix from Darkwing Duck, who could enter paintings or bring them to life.
 * Metalocalypse is made of this, including the Five-Man Band and a majority of the other artists that they run into.
 * Despite his stage appearance, Leonard Rockstein A.K.A. "Dr. Rockzo the Rock n' Roll Clown" is fairly normal when he's not on cocaine.
 * Of course, he's always on cocaine.
 * In an episode of The Simpsons parodying True Art Is Incomprehensible, Homer is taken for a literal Mad Artist from the result of his frustrated rage when trying to build a barbecue. After that burns out, for his next work he floods the entirety of Springfield.
 * To rave reviews.
 * To be fair, he was mad, at the barbecue.
 * South Park had funnybot, who
 * In one round of Ozzy and Drix, a beatnik guy was up to tricks. A mean cholesterol sublime, he dressed in black and spoke in rhyme. He zeroed in on Hector's heart so he could get an early start to make his great "disasterpiece," of which he'd name it "Heart Disease."
 * In one round of Ozzy and Drix, a beatnik guy was up to tricks. A mean cholesterol sublime, he dressed in black and spoke in rhyme. He zeroed in on Hector's heart so he could get an early start to make his great "disasterpiece," of which he'd name it "Heart Disease."

Real Life

 * Werner Herzog and Klaus Kinski, a pair of mad artists who made mad movies together.
 * While filming Aguirre the Wrath of God, Kinski suddenly became enraged at a noisy cardgame being played in a nearby tent, so he took a pistol and fired three shots into the tent, blowing off the tip of a crewman's finger. Later, when Kinski threatened to walk off the set, Herzog showed him a rifle and told him that if he tried to leave, Herzog would shoot him, then turn the gun on himself. Kinski stayed. The legend of this incident turned the story into Herzog directing Kinski at gunpoint.
 * While filming Fitzcarraldo, Kinski's frequent outbursts and tantrums so shocked the natives performing as extras that a group of them met with Herzog and offered to kill him. Herzog politely declined.
 * Herzog once said that if Errol Morris ever completed his documentary about pet cemetaries, Gates of Heaven, he'd eat his shoe. He did, and he did.
 * During an interview for his film Grizzly Man, a crazed fan opened fire on Herzog with an air rifle. After being hit, Herzog commented, "Oh, someone's shooting. We must go." Once inside, he continued the interview while bleeding from the wound, saying, "It is not a significant bullet. I am not afraid."
 * It’s questionable whether they really are insane. Certainly Kinski was a prima donna, and they’re both outrageous egotists, but Herzog has a known reputation as a bullshitter, and it’s possible- in fact, quite likely, he’s spent the last forty years playing up the Mad Artist schtick to get people talking. I know he strictly believes that no press is the only bad press.
 * Alan Moore, comic book writer, worships a fictional ancient Roman deity -- fictional even to the ancient Romans; believes he has met in person characters he invented; and chooses to look like Rasputin in every book jacket photo of himself ever taken.
 * Norwegian black metal band Mayhem. Their lead singer, "Dead" was known to carry a rotting crow with him on tours so he could huff it before shows. He had T-shirts with funeral announcements printed on them, once mutilated himself to the point of hospitalization, and used to bury his clothes for months so they'd be sufficiently decomposed for tours. He committed suicide in 1991, and upon discovering his corpse, the guitarist took pictures of it (which were later used for an album cover), removed part of his skull, and made necklaces out of it, which he sent to bands that he deemed "worthy."
 * And while we're on the topic of black metal, there's everyone's favorite mountain man Varg Vikernes, of Burzum. According to Varg, the high point of his childhood involved using a .22 to take potshots at the local McDonald's (to fight the "growing Americanization of Norway") and visiting Iraq when his father worked for Saddam. It was Varg who gave Dead the shotgun shells he used to off himself, something he laughed about years later. Varg was best friends with Mayhem guitarist Euronymous, and the two became super special church-arson pals. After Mayhem bassist Necrobutcher quit, Varg was brought into the band. However, his attitude clashed with Euronymous, and the two started to feud. This ended when Varg finally fatally stabbed Euronymous 23 times in his Oslo apartment. Varg was arrested, made a mockery out of his trial, and was given the maximum 21 year sentence. While in jail, he attempted to escape twice, along with releasing two Burzum albums and declaring himself a Nazi/Skinhead/White Nationalist/Odinist/Whatever term he felt like. After his 2009 release for good behavior, Varg purchased a farm in the Norwegian mountains, where he lives as a hermit, periodically releasing new albums and giving bizarre, oftentimes unsettling interviews by correspondence. And no, he hasn't gone soft: his last major written publication was him theorizing that Anders Breivik was part of a zionist "false flag" operation to discredit true Norwegian nationalism.
 * Grant Morrison. Self-proclaimed chaos magician. Claims to have been abducted by aliens. Pretty good writer.
 * Warren Ellis gets there sometimes, too. Must be something in the water in England...
 * Van Gogh famously cut off part of his own ear and gave it to a prostitute named Rachel with whom he was in love. When his art failed to find buyers,he shot himself in the chest, which didn't kill him until three days later.
 * Salvador Dalí, though it's hard to say whether they were publicity stunts, or he was really crazy.
 * Claimed he christened all his paintings by ejaculating onto the canvas after they were finished.
 * Wore a full-body scuba suit to the opening of his New York gallery; he promptly fainted from the heat.
 * He often slept in a chair holding a spoon over a metal pan, and as soon as he was relaxed enough to drop the spoon, it woke him up, thereby keeping him from ever entering REM sleep and dreaming; he liked to say that this forced him to dream while awake.
 * Dali famously stated "I don't do drugs. I am the drug."
 * The Yale student who created an art installation supposedly containing blood from aborted fetuses may have been playing with this trope.
 * Philip K Dick. Not only did he feel the presence of his deadborn sister during most of his life, but: he did make a very bad trip the first (and only) time he tried LSD, which he described as being sent back in a Roman arena as an early Christian for what seemed an eternity; he had some serious hallucinations which he attributed to an accidental vitamin overdose (because, obviously, his life-long habit of gobbling amphetamines like Pez candies couldn't have something to do with it); theorized that these visions where beamed into his brain by, your choice: the Russians, evil aliens, good aliens, Richard Nixon's staff, his dead sister, a living satellite, a gnostic deity, or the Universe trying to free itself; and wrote over 9000 pages about that.
 * Adolf Hitler was an aspiring artist. His paintings of buildings were okay, but he sucked at drawing people. He later turned to extremist demagogue ideology...
 * This seems to be the modus operandi of Jason Nelson of secrettechnology.com
 * Subversion: Zdzislaw Beksinski, a perfectly sane and genuinely nice artist who happened to be a Nightmare Fuel Station Attendant. He claimed his paintings were based on his dreams. Living in Poland during WW 2 probably had something to do with it.
 * Apparently, Derek Riggs, creator of Iron Maiden's Eddie.
 * Alfred Hitchcock was legendarily eccentric.
 * Hideaki Anno. Apparently, he told one of his actresses to choke the other actress she was working with for a take, told the singer of the ED to imagine "choking a kitten with a big smile on your face", and oh yeah, making End of Evangelion.
 * James Ellroy, whose mother's unsolved rape and murder caused him to become obsessed with violent and sexual crime. After spending his teen years as a drug-addled street thief, he entered rehab and decided to write novels as a way to share his inner demons with the world. He was also a bit weird even before the murder, and would often spy on his mother having sex.
 * The Marquis de Sade, who gave "sadism" its name, wrote most of his work from prison or an insane asylum. The film Quills gives a rather disturbing account of how far he would go to get his work out.
 * Leopold von Sacher-Masoch gave "masochism" its name. His book Venus in Furs gave its name to The Velvet Underground's song, which is fittingly about S&M.
 * Kunihiko Ikuhara, director of Sailor Moon and Revolutionary Girl Utena and now of Mawaru Penguindrum, who is a merry prankster with Utena Word of God. He has said things like "Miki's watch holds the secrets of the universe."
 * Caravaggio, a Baroque artist, once killed a man, supposedly over a tennis match.
 * British artist Robert Linkiewicz kept a friend's corpse hidden in his house for almost twenty years. It was found in a secret compartment after Linkiewicz himself died.
 * Syd Barret from Pink Floyd became Schizophrenic after too many LSD trips
 * Andy Warhol had multiple Siamese cats, all named Sam, had numerous nearly incomprehensible interviews, was said to lick shoes while they were still on peoples' feet, hated painting because it was messy (and then popularized silkscreen printing), and was a major contributor to Post Modernism. However, he usually knew that his behavior was eccentric, and often tried to confuse other people with his behavior to see how they would react.
 * William S. Burroughs. Killing his wife while imitating William Tell certainly qualifies him.
 * Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec. An inbred dwarf, Post-Impressionist and patron of the Moulin Rouge, he was known to get into bar fights defending the artistic merits of Van Gogh. Contracting syphilis certainly didn't help him any, either.
 * Carlo Gesualdo. Italian Renaissance prince, musical genius, masochist, and multiple murderer. May have been poisoned by his second wife.
 * The KLF took this trope as far as it can be taken without murdering someone. They pelted audiences with money, "advertised" by releasing surreal manifestos, and announced their retirement from the music industry by firing a machinegun (loaded with blanks) into the crowd at a music award show and dumping a sheep carcass on stage. After that they deleted their entire back catalogue, awarded a Turner Prize winner with forty thousand pounds for "worst artist of the year" after threatening to burn the money if she didn't accept it, and eventually filmed themselves burning one million pounds.
 * The artists of the Italian futurist movement claimed to be furiously insane and were proud of it. That is not so surprising to hear from people who stated they wanted to burn and destroy books, libraries, cemetaries, symbols of the past in general and institute a course for Italian children in which they would be exposed to increasingly dangerous threats. Not too surprisingly, they helped to inspire the Fascist movement, and many of them joined.
 * Quebec poet Emile Nelligan spent roughly the last 40 years of his life in an asylum.
 * Phil Spector's "Wall of Sound" and other abilities made him one of the greatest record producers ever. He also liked to hold women at gunpoint, leading to the murder of Lana Clarkson.
 * Francisco Goya started by painting commissioned portraits and ended with dark, nightmarish imagery. Throughout his life, he underwent a mental breakdown, likely brought on by the lead he used to mix his paints.
 * Ezra Pound, described by TIME magazine as "a cat that walks by himself, tenaciously unhousebroken and very unsafe for children." His support of the Nazis and continued antisemitism for the rest of his life, stemming from his outrage over the pointless loss of life during World War I, has ensured his work will forever be controversial. He also suffered a complete breakdown after being kept in solitary confinement for almost a month after World War II.
 * The speaker in the satirical essay On Murder considered as one of the Fine Arts by Thomas de Quincy. However, it's less Mad Artist and more Mad Art Critic.
 * Pretty much all of the artists in this Cracked article.
 * Oscar Wilde was certainly perceived as insane at his trial where he just insulted the Prosecution and didn't really say anything to his own credit.
 * Winston Churchill who drank three scotches between breakfast and lunch alone, quaffed an entire bottle of Port before bed, only slept four hours, had a tendency to walk around naked and once turned up to a meeting wearing nothing but a pair of pink silk boxer shorts. Tended to alleviate his hellish bouts of depression by painting.
 * Christian Weston Chandler, creator of Sonichu, has some serious mental issues.
 * Doctor Jack Kervorkian, a prominent proponent of euthanasia commonly known as "Dr. Death." He was an avid painter. Some of his art is....interesting to say the least...