I remember one Beetle Bailey strip that played on this idea.
Beetle is painting a room and finds himself in a corner and one of his comrades says how this is just like those cartoons and Beetle asks what’s the issue and the comrade says, well, now you have no way out.
And Beetle walks across the wet floor leaving footprints and the comrade says something to the effect, oh, I guess it’s not such a conundrum if you don’t care about your work.
I remember the variation where Beetle paints himself into a corner and Sarge berates him for his stupidity since now he’s trapped there for hours. But Beetle knows what he’s doing: trapped, he happily naps for the rest of the afternoon.
“He just needed to paint a door behind him. Then he could open it and exit the room.”
Wrong cartoonist. But you are onto something. If we accept the narrative imperative of the cartoonist as natural law then with Charles Addams as the cartoonist suicide is just something one does and using ones surroundings or tools of trade as method and/or motifs is just practical simplicity.
I got the general idea of the Gaston but couldn’t read the thought balloons (too blurry even when enlarged) but I managed to Google my way to Liste des inventions de Gaston Lagaffe, where I found ‘Peinture à séchage ultra-rapide pour revêtement de sol : elle fait fondre le revêtement et détruit le plancher (planche 509). Which I take to mean ‘Super-fast-drying paint for floor (sol ^= earth?) covering: it makes the covering melt and destroys the floor.’
“sol”= floor (inside) or ground (outside).
“Si on me voyait, on jurerait qu’il m’arrive le vieux gag idiot du type coincé par sa peinture.”
If someone saw me, they would swear that the stupid old gag of the guy stuck by his painting is happening to me.
“Mais pas de danger : mon produit pénètre instantanément et sèche tout de suite.”
But no danger: my product impregnates instantly and dries immediately.
That was really not clear. (Neither was it clear that this was all inside a room – if the corner wasn’t missing from the first panel that part would have been a lot clearer.)
Comics I Don't Understand 
He has literally painted himself into a corner. He doesn’t want to starve while the paint dries, so this is a less painful alternative.
But in direct answer to your question, “Yes”.
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Is this art piece titled: A Brush With Death?
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I remember one Beetle Bailey strip that played on this idea.
Beetle is painting a room and finds himself in a corner and one of his comrades says how this is just like those cartoons and Beetle asks what’s the issue and the comrade says, well, now you have no way out.
And Beetle walks across the wet floor leaving footprints and the comrade says something to the effect, oh, I guess it’s not such a conundrum if you don’t care about your work.
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Wouldn’t work in this case:
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I’ve been seeing that painted-into-a-corner meme since my first days of TV cartoons.
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Another variant: Painter carefully paints until he has his back to a door. He smugly opens it and is surprised to find a closet.
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I remember the variation where Beetle paints himself into a corner and Sarge berates him for his stupidity since now he’s trapped there for hours. But Beetle knows what he’s doing: trapped, he happily naps for the rest of the afternoon.
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There’s no way the sconce will hold his weight.
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He’s a professional painter, making a rookie mistake.
He can’t bear the thought of what he’s done, and so he’s overreacting.
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He just needed to paint a door behind him. Then he could open it and exit the room.
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He is lifting himself off the floor so that he can paint the final corner of the floor.
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“He just needed to paint a door behind him. Then he could open it and exit the room.”
Wrong cartoonist. But you are onto something. If we accept the narrative imperative of the cartoonist as natural law then with Charles Addams as the cartoonist suicide is just something one does and using ones surroundings or tools of trade as method and/or motifs is just practical simplicity.
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I got the general idea of the Gaston but couldn’t read the thought balloons (too blurry even when enlarged) but I managed to Google my way to Liste des inventions de Gaston Lagaffe, where I found ‘Peinture à séchage ultra-rapide pour revêtement de sol : elle fait fondre le revêtement et détruit le plancher (planche 509). Which I take to mean ‘Super-fast-drying paint for floor (sol ^= earth?) covering: it makes the covering melt and destroys the floor.’
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“sol”= floor (inside) or ground (outside).
“Si on me voyait, on jurerait qu’il m’arrive le vieux gag idiot du type coincé par sa peinture.”
If someone saw me, they would swear that the stupid old gag of the guy stuck by his painting is happening to me.
“Mais pas de danger : mon produit pénètre instantanément et sèche tout de suite.”
But no danger: my product impregnates instantly and dries immediately.
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Thank you, Olivier.
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Indeed.
now though I really don’t understand why the floor opens to the sky.
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Not the sky: the walls of the office below are blue (see the chart pinned on it?).
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At first I also thought the clouds were made of water, not floor ashes.
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That was really not clear. (Neither was it clear that this was all inside a room – if the corner wasn’t missing from the first panel that part would have been a lot clearer.)
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Well, to be fair, this is only the second half of the gag (the first four panels show his preparing the paint).
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