No, decidedly not. Certainly not. NO remarks. Patrick’s heart is pounding as he refuses.

The call ends badly then, the way it began. Pierpont is antsy and angry. Perhaps he has an inkling that Patrick isn’t going to be the big draw he had hoped. No one remembers that he was once an up-and-coming sculptor, and they sure as hell don’t care that a nobody sculptor is now going to try to be a nobody-in-every-sense painter. And one that won’t talk in public, to boot.

What artist would want to talk at an occasion like this one? Well, come to think of it, he’s known a few. Too many, actually. The types that wear their egos right on their chests and who slick back their brilliant artist hair and rub their brilliant artist beards and say pontificating things to the public about art and meaning and symbolism.

If he got up there, he’d say, “Art is pain. It is grief and agony and I hated my life while I painted these paintings. I look at them now, and I want never to see them again. I don’t even want any of you to see them. I have—I have been skinned alive by this work.” And then he would leave. Catch a cab and go somewhere where they couldn’t find him and ask another thing of him.

He wonders if he dares go online and see what the article says.

He’s dreaded it so much that now that it’s here, he’s quite sure he doesn’t want to put himself through any more.

Only he can’t rest. Nothing helps. He paces around, he stares at his reflection in the bathroom mirror, decides he still looks as bad as ever, he paces some more, talks to Roy who is decidedly unsympathetic. Finally, with great effort, he gets up and lets himself out the front door, goes over to Paco’s, where the magazines had been delivered several hours ago.

“Hey, man of the hour!” says Paco. “Look at you, on the cover of Inside Outside, you devil you.”

“Yeah,” Patrick says. “Look at me.”

“You no worry, Patrick. It’s a good story. We read it out loud to ourselves here this morning. And everybody say the same thing: ‘That Patrick. He’s a real good guy.’”

INSIDE OUTSIDE MAGAZINE

BROOKLYN’S LATEST WORD ON ART

Scarred, Grieving but Unbowed: Brooklyn Artist Mounts a Comeback

Patrick Delaney, 36, doesn’t look anything like the dashing, handsome man he was when he was considered the “Golden Boy of Sculpture” eight years ago. His face, once chiseled and with a jawline that actors would envy, is now lined and scarred by burns he suffered in a devastating fire in a New York loft—a fire that killed his young girlfriend even as he attempted to save her life.

But what Delaney has lost in his golden-boy looks, he’s more than made up for in stature, as a hero and now, as an artist seeking to make a comeback in a whole new medium.

Delaney doesn’t like to talk about the fire, or its aftermath, the months when he lived in a downtown hotel, contemplating his own mortality and vowing that he would never do sculpture, or any kind of art, again. He is a man of few words who grows visibly uncomfortable when asked what that turning point was like in his life.

“I had lost my appetite for art,” he says.

According to police reports on file, it was an ordinary summer day in August of 2010 when Delaney and his girlfriend, Anneliese Cunningham, awoke in their SoHo loft and, as they did most days, got to work creating sculpture. Delaney was working on a sculpture called The Fallen Angel that had been commissioned by the New York City collector Regis Harrington—a piece that would never be completed.

Cunningham, 24, a sculptor in her own right, was working on an untitled piece she hoped to enter into a show in the fall. She went to the little galley kitchen area to start the morning’s coffee. According to fire officials, a gas leak triggered an immediate explosion that killed Cunningham outright, engulfing her in flames.

Delaney raced toward her, police said, and because of his heroics in reaching for her to put out the fire, he suffered second- and third-degree burns on his face, hands and arms. He was transported by ambulance to the burn unit at Mount Sinai Hospital, where he was placed in a medically induced coma. Over the next few months he underwent several surgeries to repair damage to his hands and face. It was thought that he’d never be able to do art again.

Today, Delaney has little to say on the subject. His one statement, delivered in a choked-off voice, is, “I couldn’t imagine why she had to die and why I remained alive. And I was not a hero that day. I am not the hero of this story. There is no hero.”

He doesn’t think of himself as a hero because he was unable to save her. In fact, medical records show that Delaney passed out from the heat upon reaching her, and he didn’t even know what had happened until he woke up in a hospital weeks later with his face and hands and arms requiring numerous surgeries. The art world was lost to him.

The months and years that followed took their toll—and in talking to him today, a visitor can see in his eyes the remains of grief and survivor’s guilt. He became a recluse, living in a basement apartment in Brooklyn with Roy, his opinionated orange cat, and writing for a medical website, and venturing out only when he was reasonably assured of not running into other people.

Only recently has his life turned around enough that Delaney is willing once again to create art. Over the past three years, Delaney has started painting in oils again, though not with any real interest. According to gallery owner Philip Pierpont, a friend of Delaney’s, it seemed that at first Delaney had lost the will to try to penetrate the depth of creativity and strive to find its meaning.

“He was hiding. But,” says Pierpont, “in a triumph of human spirit, Patrick kept at it. I always knew that deep down in him, the will to triumph over adversity would come through, and with his reentry into a new art form, I have every confidence that he will show us a return of nothing less than his very soul.”

Pierpont has asked him to exhibit his paintings this January in a one-man show at the Pierpont Gallery in Manhattan, something those who know him never thought would happen.

“I have always been an admirer of Patrick Delaney’s sensibility, his sensitivity, and the soulfulness of his work,” says Pierpont. “I own several of his sculptures, and we have had two successful shows together. I reached out to him and said, ‘It’s time, man, for you to get back into the art world.’ He agreed, although perhaps reluctantly, and now I can’t wait to see what he comes up with. The thing about Patrick Delaney is that you know you are going to plumb the depths of feeling—all feeling—represented in his work. You come away a changed person.”

Delaney was always considered a sculptor of great range and even whimsy, with his depictions of courtship in Cupid’s Arrow Misses and Friday Night Date Night. His Bird on Two Wires received an American Post Prize and his triptych, titled The Way of Men, was mentioned in Art Today magazine as evidence that Delaney was an “artist under thirty who bears watching.”

Delaney is perhaps understandably secretive about the paintings he is preparing for his show, as well he might be. After all, he was never known for his painterly abilities, especially as an abstract expressionist.

But Pierpont says he has no doubt that this will give Delaney an opportunity to stretch and grow and see what remains now that the past is behind him. “Of course we know that for artists, the past is never fully dealt with and put away,” says Pierpont, “and we expect that Patrick’s work will reflect the full range of his suffering. We are looking forward to welcoming him back into the art world and into a whole new range of possibility.”