Reflected in her Work

                Introduction

           

This story is inspired by a girl that I met in a local coffee shop. She is an artist, with no formal instruction on art theory, yet her work is stunning in its ability to capture the figure of the human body. Not only to capture the figure of the human body but also to capture the emotion and colors. A man came into the store while I was there with her, sitting, talking, and he asked her if she would make him a portrait. He told her that the woman that had made his last portrait did such a horrible job and that he thought her work was superior in comparison. (I have never seen the work of the other woman, but I will assume that the work that Adorns Tastebuds coffee shop… are superior). The man then went on to tell her that he would pay her more than what he paid the first artist to fix the portrait.

            Her response is what inspired this story in its entirety. She told the man that she did not create artwork for the money she did it to do it. It’s not the wealth; it’s the art.

            In reading this, understand that this story is, in no way, a negative one. I understand that some things that of the diction and imagery are ones usually associated with a  negative connotation; however, this story has the utmost respect for an artist that is just that �" an artist.

Also, often times people do not understand the pieces of artists and thus they criticize it. I am in no way saying that her work is criticized negatively. I would just like to make that social statement. That an artist puts his or her soul into this work and gives the work a piece of themselves. I hope you like what you read…

 

Reflected in her Work

 

Picking up the smallest of her tools, she presses that brush to the paper and pulls it across until the paint runs out. She repeats this process several times, until looking back at her is the perfect outline of a human face. Each and every time this face looks distinctly familiar to her. A perfect stranger in the acrylic that she can call a friend, and recount facial features: from hair to toe nails. This woman’s eyes are a light bluish green that looked soft like pastel or oil painting and never fail to absorb the colors of the lights around them.  She looks up at the creator in adoring affection, the light reflecting off of her radiant, yet small nose.  Around her head like hands embracing her for a tender kiss, lays her hair in all its blonde wonder. She knows that her painting cannot move, it cannot feel, it cannot speak, and it does not possess emotions of its own, but she can feel something that burns from within each and every piece of work that she does; especially the ones with this girl in them. Her eyes seem to follow the artist as she moves around, searching for paint or brushes.

            Though the painting appears bright and radiant, new and beautiful; the painter is lacking luster in her cheeks. She had gone to the psychiatrist multiple times hoping to glean something about her current problem, but all the doctor could tell her was to make sure that she had a hobby. “A hobby, dear girl, will keep you energized. It will fill your mind and make you have purpose in your life. You don’t need medication, you need fulfilling work”, Dr. Ambrose has told her weeks before she stopped going. This painting, though, was like her child. Every painting was like her child, like her soul incarnate. Then, breaking the seal of a new bottle of paint, she looks back to her piece contemplating what background to give her beauty. The blue paint reflects the small light over top her head that lights her little studio. One little dot of white in her blue, a reflection of the light above. With this blue she gives her soul a home with a wonderful blue mid-day sky. “Humph, ‘Work will fill the void’”, she slings the paint of the grass below her daughter, “what void.” Feeling a bit weaker, she picks up a bottle of the lightest purple that she owns. With this purple she creates the mountains in the back ground, and blends them with the blue sky than surrounds the blond hair of her spirit. “I’m not depressed, nor do I have any other clinical problems”, she slings a cloud from the white bottle.

            Panting she falls to the ground, out of breath as her heart beat is less prominently heard in her ears. Worst of all; however, she cannot feel the emotion that lead her to paint this painting. She is unable to sympathize with the facial expression of the girl in the painting. That smile that stretches across her face in the most expression that she can, yet the painter does not remember a time when that same smile ever crossed her face. All that is left of her now is tears that stream down her face and make her face red, dark red with pure sadness. Nothing left her feeling but that, that she can remember.

           

 

            The brush is covered in paint, and her fingers brittle around it. They pop and crack as she wrings in her little boney hands.  She coughs into the pall-cover-like blanket that surrounds her body next to the easel. She scrapes the brush along the canvas of this final painting, for she feels her time is coming close to an end. The mark of paint is finished and her eyes skin a little deeper into her eye-sockets and her cheeks grow sallow.  This was the doctor’s orders and this is how she is going to take care of her ailment the way that it is. She does not know any other way to take care of the problem other than to, as Konrad would say, “Have a purposeful job.” So she paints away. With each stroke she grows weaker and weaker. Each time she raises the brush she has to work a little harder, push harder, like lifting weights and she is about to max out. After the next brush stroke she, coughs into the blanket again �" a thin moist, crimson liquid covers the blanket, but she knew it was coming. She keeps painting. She has to get this one done; the fluidity of time will not take her out past the Light House without this one piece of artwork.

            Stroking the page once more, she realizes that the doctor is wrong as it stands. What he said about her needing something to do as if to fill her. She paints, draws, and creates not because of needing something, not to make her immortal. She paints and creates because she feels it. Or felt it. She puts all of herself into these beautiful master pieces. Laying the brush down into canvas again, she passes out. Short of breath in her unconsciousness, she lets out her last breath peacefully…

            The next day, no one had heard from her, seen her and her family sent the police in the area to check out her house. They stormed the building, broke down the door, and there she was. Sitting in a chain on the canvas, looking back at the policemen she pushes her brush into a painted canvas. In that canvas, is another imprint of her spirit on another painting another. There in each canvas past the first, she looks back as she paints the next. And it goes down to the minutest detail in its beauty. She has painted every living emotion that she had in each and every face of these doppelgangers.

            Where she sat while she was painting her master piece, there is nothing there now. Just a blanket with blood stains. She has absolved into what she loved doing so much. No need for artistic immortality, just have lived and given all she had to something she loved…