The weekly challenge page can be found here.Thanks to @theinkwell for this week’s prompt.
This was a tough week, and I confess, was the longest I’ve taken to put together a piece for these prompts. I guess part of the challenge was doing justice to the character emerging from the prompt - perhaps I felt the weight of an artist, tortured by needing to get it just right. I enjoyed the challenge of building a character; opting for an unnamed young woman with a somewhat universal quality. She could be anyone, yet is defined by her experience in art. This week, I'm playing with colour symbolism, you might notice a red motif running through, pairing with a growing darkness.
For those with a keen literary eye, you might have already been delighted by the allusion in the title to Oscar Wilde - one of the greatest literary artists I know.
Cover manipulated in Canva, using linked image
Weekly Prompt: Artist
Skill building: Character Description
**The wine and blood were red. **
Spotting the floor, caressing the carpet; neither stain would likely ever come out, nor the flecks it left on her heart. She had cut her hand as she smashed the long-stemmed glass, an heirloom gifted from her grandmother. She looked at the pieces, small, but beautiful – and much like herself, shattered.
She had put her everything, her absolute being, her soul, her life – utterly everything into her self-portrait, and it had been destroyed by another’s malice. She had not won the local art prize, instead, nepotism had won. The venality of it all had left her seething.
As she stood, losing track of time, she would unconsciously pull back a rogue mousey brown hair from her porcelain face. Her lips were not as red as her anger, and she was not known for her deep eyes, nor her freckles. She was not distinct in any particularly way, yet she could capture the world in a stroke of a brush – taking the lines of the horizon and painting the oceans into a new existence.
On receiving the phone call, she had slumped her small shoulders. ‘Oh, but it will be better for our small art society’s profile’. ‘And yes, she is the Chairman’s daughter’. ‘No, don’t get me wrong, your work was technically better, but you know--‘. She had cut off the spiel; she had heard it before, but this time it was different, this time was not about another’s vanity, but rather, her masterpiece and its demand for an audience.
Regaining her composure, and steadying her breathing, she realised the night had fallen dark, and she went to bed.
For a short while, she tossed from one side to the other, agitated, yet on the dawn of inspiration. The night was not warm, but she felt unsettled. She rose shortly after eleven, a little weary on her feet, perhaps grateful that most of the bottle had been left on the floor, rather than consumed. She seemed to be drawn to her studio, and her pale hands traced the walls along the corridor until they found the doorknob. She moved her tongue over her left incisor, and understood that she was about to lose herself to her art.
Tentatively, she moved things around her desk, the clutter more about her lack of organisational care, than a deliberate attempt to portray an artist’s aloofness. Finding her charcoals and a discarded canvas long ago painted in shades of crimson, she took her seat. She sketched a deliberate outline of the trees she couldn’t see, but knew were outside her window. Beneath them, she placed a young woman. An occasional tear dropped to the canvas, quickly mixing through the blacks.
As she worked her look became more intensely jaded, and at times, she heaved her small breast – her breathing punctuating an otherwise silent night. She had never worn pyjamas, opting for an old singlet top instead. As the night wore thin and the morning began to emerge, the pale green top had become increasingly soiled with the charcoals. The gloom of her mood sat poignantly in the room, not yet dispersed by an exclamation of creative fervour as the world of her art became more powerfully real.
Hours later, she stopped. She placed the canvas by the window, studying the intricate lines and the dark gradients consuming the space. In this moment, it was a gateway to her entire world, both heavy and black. A vista, she felt, may never be unburdened.
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You delivered yet another wonderfully woven piece of the prompt and the weekly focus of describing the character.
Thank you for sharing the story with The Ink Well. We appreciate your engagement with other writers in the community.
This is a beautifully crafted piece. It made a good read. You know, such feeling like you are reading a classical novel, that's what I got while going through this work. Well done.
I love that you pay homage to one of your favorite writers, @lordtimoty. You've masterfully captured an artist at a crisis point. Her despair and anger, paired with the powerful imagery of red wine and shattered glass, create a great tension. We fear what she may do in her darkest moments, and this creates the story's arc. But the artist turns to her craft, taking out her deep angst in the form of dark artistic expression. This provides the release of the tension built early in the story, and resolves the conflict beautifully. Well done!
One small thing you might want to correct is this line:
Thank you for joining the weekly prompt!
Morning @Jayna; always the way, you read a piece over and over and you'll never see your own typos. In truth, I think this sentence originally did call for the 'she' before morphing in its new direction. Perhaps then, it's worth another detour?
"her breathing punctuating an otherwise silent night."
Have a fabulous day, Tim.
Nice! I edit my stories forever and then I look at them the next time and I still find something I want to change. I send mine off to publications, and it's always tough to say one is officially done.
That's awesome to hear you publish; where do your stories end up? Novels, or magazines or in other places? Academia? You may as well just call this the inquisition!
Ha ha. Well, I've been writing short stories off and on for quite a few years, @lordtimoty. Recently, I finally got serious about polishing them and submitting them to online journals and literary magazines. Slowly, they are starting to be accepted and published. It is a lengthy process! As they are published, I add them to this page on my website: https://jaynalocke.com/fiction/publications/.
very deep indeed, good expressions, I have to read more of your work, because this one is inspiring for me.
Ahh, the anger of an artist who sees the work of another preferred to their own. Very human, very genuinely told. Then the skinny, mousy person whose appearance becomes unimportant when she takes up the brush and seeks to express the full dimension of human feelings. Quite conceivable that the paintbrush leads either to an unjust weapon or to healing self-knowledge. I like your choice of words, such as her lips not being as red as her anger.
You don't have to like a person yourself to love their art, do you?
Good evening @erh.germany; I think this woman had to be unnamed, but I wonder if this meant that we see too many people in her, and that's leading to variable feelings on my part. I'll be honest, I wrote this piece very much feeling sorry for her, and thinking about her pain. However, the next day, I couldn't help think that she was a bit self-indulgent. Was the painting of the charcoal canvas about release, or intention to live in that pain? I don't know the answer.
I was quite chuffed with the 'lips not being as red as her anger' line too. Given the week's challenge was character building, I imagined the easy description would be the full red lips, and green eyes and freckles or blonde hair. I think this unnamed woman had to have plain and indistinct qualities and that's the image I tried to work towards.
Either way, I appreciate your engagement on my page, and the opportunity to reflect on my own piece. Have a fabulous weekend.
Tim
Good morning, from where I live,
I think one cannot see too many people in a character, for a creature like a human being can contain numerous of them at the same time, and also, witnessing someone else or trying to catch his situation, leads to different outcomes within different spacetimes. Like you so pointedly said that
I could read your story in a moment of misery myself, or take it as a nice morning routine to check up on what's there on the blockchain :) two (and more) possible different reactions are possible, if not probable.
There is nothing to say against sharing or having pain. As long as one doesn't stick endlessly to it :)
I invite you to read my take on the prompt. Curious, what you might say or see in it.
You too, have a fine weekend.
E.
P.S. very much so, the snob in me goes against direct character attributes, but sometimes the mind is lazy and let it slip through. Very well done on your part!
An intense and beautiful piece of prose.