An artist’s work comes alive, much to his surprise
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Tags: fiction, poetry, writing
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June 5, 2008 at 7:59 am |
“What did it feel like?” I asked her, “being carved, I mean.”
“Like nothing at all,” it said, “and then came pain like you cannot imagine. I was always there, I think, inside that stone. My sculptress saw me in there when she bought it, and tried to release me. But, alas, she is only human.”
The statue looked at its hands, shaking slightly. The workmanship is quite perfect, but for a patch on the left hand where the scratches left by the tools used by the artist that freed her remained.
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“Only the gods can create,” it said, as though talking to a child, “my sculptress liberated me, she did not create.” It paused, looking at its hand, “This is a reminder of that.”
“Does it hurt?” I asked.
“What do you think?”
A Grecian nude, was what the statue was meant to be, although now it wore a robe. Human form begets human modesty, it would seem. Or perhaps a desire to fit in. I must admit, it did help to de-alienate her somewhat. It, not her. One cannot be totally indifferent to an entity wearing a bathrobe, even if she – it – was of marble.
And the artist, I asked, what of her?
She – it – shrank back, “I haven’t seen her since… she put me in a box. She hated me. I was to be a commission, to go in a hotel, worth a great deal to her, but she saw me as a flawed creation. Why should she be responsible for me, she shouted, I was an accident.” The statue’s gaze were fixed on my shoe. Was she talking to me? It didn’t feel so.
Suddenly, her eyes darted up to meet mine. “I was not the first, you know?”
“I’m sorry?”
“The first of her – ” she paused. “The first of us to awaken in her workshop.”
“There are others?”
She leaned in closer to me, “in the basement, I found them. Half-shown faces, twitching and choking. She found them, and she abandoned them.”
“Why do you think she didn’t do the same to you?” I asked.
“I waited,” it – she – said, “until she had finished. I did not want to distract her, lest she make a mistake. The statue rubbed the scratch on her left hand. “Another one, at least”.
I nodded, not knowing what to say. Half-formed or half-liberated, those things in the artist’s basement would be of great academic interest. This specimen, clearly, showed promise. Few artists have the skill to chip at stone and bring out the statue that waits within, let alone by accident. Her aborted, imperfect, works were testament to this.
“What will you do now?” I asked her, then regretted it. A look of panic brushed over her face, and she shrugged.
We sat in silence for a while, until I had made the decision to leave. I was about to say my goodbyes, when she looked up at me.
“I will find that cellar,” she said, “and those left behind”.
June 5, 2008 at 5:05 pm |
I love this! The idea that she will hunt down the ‘half-lifes to try to save them. Very thought provoking
June 5, 2008 at 5:05 pm |
Claude was very, very tired when he finished his opus. He curled up on the little settee he kept in his studio for models and impromptu liaisons that he felt made him more ‘artistic’. He curled his lithe, long body under a thin sheet once draped over the sculpture that he had spent years crafting from a single block of marble.
He drifted to sleep.
Claude woke with a start. A loud crack shook the room; Claude gripped the dusty sheet around him. Then, as his eyes grew accustomed to the gloom, he saw it, he saw her. The marble goddess crafted from all the women he had used and abused. A pang of regret sank deep into his stomach as a shattered finger stretched around his throat.
It was to be his opus, the representation of his life’s work. He hadn’t realised just how successful he had been as the women’s raging souls took their revenge.
July 21, 2008 at 9:54 pm |
The painting was considered an existential masterpiece, which of course meant that it was horribly, horribly depressing. It was painted by a horribly depressing artist, who sold it to a horribly depressing museum so a smattering of horribly depressing people could look at it and chat about how horribly depressing it was.
The painting itself consisted of a lonely figure in an abandoned train station. On a technical scale the work was excellent, taking advantage of all of the tools at an artist’s disposal: perspective, shading, and so on. The train station was rendered in loving detail, with its utter emptiness coming to life (death?) via the use of dazzlingly sad shades of grey. There were no other people. There were no trains. There were no ticket attendants. Just a single, sad, lonely figure, his back turned, wearing a brown trenchcoat and a trilby hat, so as to prevent any of the actual person from showing.
The artist was immensely proud of his work, and decided to visit the museum one day to see how his painting stacked up against the others on display. He headed out later in the evening, and to his dismay found that the museum had already closed. Damn, he’d forgotten that it was a saturday. He tried the door, and to his surprise it opened effortlessly. Apparently, the guard had forgotten to lock the door. Pretty big thing to forget, but the artist decided not to dwell on it.
Once inside, he found his way to where his painting hung. The first thing that came to his mind when he saw it wasn’t an awe at finally being critically recognized. It wasn’t a sense of pride at having achieved his dream. Rather, his first thought was “Where did the guy go?” The trenchcoatted figure was suddenly nowhere to be found on his painting. As he broke out into a sweat, the artist felt a tap on his shoulder.
Startled, he whipped around and started stammering. “I’m very sorry, sir, the door was open and…”
It was the figure in his painting. Standing right in front of him. True to form, the figure retained no facial features, or any body features at all. His face, his hands and legs and entire body, was the color of styrofoam, and a big question mark was on his face in lieu of any facial features.
“Hello, sir,” the figure said, with a surprisingly soothing voice.
“Um… hello.” the artist muttered back, not sure what to say.
“Thank you very much for creating me.”
“You’re welcome.”
“I just have one question…” the figure’s voice trailed off, trying to find the right words. “Why did you create me so very sadly?”
“Er, what?”
“Just look at me: standing in a train station, no one to talk to, nothing to think about. Why?”
Immediately, the artist responded with a very artist-like description, the kind that is mocked mercilessly. “Well, you see, it’s existentialist. The station symbolizes… uh…” the artist just couldn’t manage to explain the meaning of a painting to the painting itself.
“There’s more to life than being sad,” the figure said. “If you were in that train station, all you’d need to do is walk up those stairs…” the figure pointed to the stairs in the painting, “and you’d be up in the world again, a world where you can find laughter and chocolate and friends and life in general. But me? If you come back a week later, I’ll still be standing there, staring blankly at the empty sign on that wall there.”
“Well, what do you want me to do?” the artist finally managed to say.
The figure looked pensive, which was more difficult than it sounds when you have no facial features. “I’ve got an idea…”
The artist listened intently. The figure’s idea sounded rather difficult, but the artist had no room for arguing so he followed the figure’s instructions to the letter. The artist took the painting off its hook, left the museum with it, and took it home. When the museum reopened the following monday, the curator were outraged to find that the door was left unlocked and the painting had been taken. Before the curator could express his fury at the appropriate people, the artist arrived, carrying the painting with him. The curator’s relief was very short lived, as when he saw the painting he exclaimed, “this isn’t the same picture at all!”
“Regardless, I’d like you to hang it up.”
“Oh… very well,” the curator obliged.
And so, for the next several weeks, ther hung a picture in the museum of a man in a trenchcoat in a train station, looking blankly forward, holding hands gently with the girl next to him. And if you were able to take the figure in the painting and turn him around, you would see that he was smiling.
July 21, 2008 at 9:58 pm |
Wow, this was long. I would just like to say that your grammar is impeccable and I’m jealous of you.
July 22, 2008 at 12:18 am |
The artist stared into the cold, lifeless eyes of his latest creation. He had worked all night in a furious daze of coffee and booze. Now, as the dawn drew near, he looked soberly upon his masterpiece, sickened, both by alcohol and his inability to create whilst not inebriated.
The man in the painting was an incarnation of raw masculinity. He stood tall and muscular, a poorly clothed demigod of some long last era where man still wrestled with the elements and heroes walked the earth using brute might to bring order to nature’s chaos. He was a masterpiece.
And yet . . . something was still missing. The same thing that was always missing, that essence that made the painting seem to come alive. No matter what the artist did, how hard he tried, he could never bestow his work with that spark.
“I’m sorry my friend,” he said glumly to his creation, “but I cannot give you the life you deserve.”
“Then I shall take yours,” boomed a sudden voice from behind. The artist spun to discover it’s origin, but caught only a blur of motion and flesh before a hard crack to the side of his skull turned everything to darkness.
His body was found three days later in a pool of blood beneath an empty canvas.