“So
what's it supposed to be?”
She
knew he didn't really mean to interrupt, and she didn't mind him
watching her paint. Some artists do: they want solitude, aloneness,
quiet, no questions. He was lucky, however. “I don't know yet,”
she replied. “Something...beautiful.”
“Ah.”
The single syllable carried quite a load of dissatisfaction. A few
moments of unquiet silence passed. “Brought you a glass of Merlot.
I know you like that when you're...creating.” He offered it to
her.
“Thank
you, sweetie,” she smiled, hopping off the tall padded barstool she
used for painting. She took the glass, kissed him on the cheek, and
had a sip. “Bored?”
“No,”
he said with a shrug, “I uh, was just...yeah. Bored.” A shy
smile crept across his face. “Sorry. I got to thinking -”
“Dangerous.”
“-
yeah, always. Anyway, It's not like I haven't seen you paint, draw,
sketch, whatever. I guess I just got wondering. How do you know
what you're making? I mean, obviously I've seen the finished
product.”
“Well,
as finished as it gets, yeah.” She sat again on her painting seat.
“Wait,
you mean the done ones aren't done?”
She
slouched a bit, a quizzical look on her face. “Yes. No. I mean,
yes, they're not done. Not to me. There's always something I feel
like I left out, or missed, or could've done differently,” she
concluded, straightening up confidently.
He
crossed his arms, raised his eyebrows, and grunted “Hm.” After
allowing the weight of this profound reply settle on the room for a
minute or so, he added an echo of himself: “So, what's this one
supposed to be?”
She
turned towards the canvas, sipped the wine, crossed her ankles,
leaned back a little, pondering, studying the embryonic scene. “I
didn't give it a hell of a lot of thought. I just started to paint –
I do that sometimes, just kinda babble with a brush. See if anything
coherent happens. Haven't you ever done that, maybe writing a note
or an email or some kind of more creative thing? I mean, I know
you've written some poems and a story or two, even if you still
won't show them to me after all these many months,” she smirked,
giving him the side-eye, “so I guess I kinda assumed you do this
sort of thing too. This?” She pointed the brush at the work in
progress, “this is babble. Hopefully it turns into beautiful
babble. But I don't have any grand design, nothing profound.”
He
had moved close to her, and now put an arm around her shoulder. “I
thought art was about
being profound. Explicate the meaning of existence, and all that.”
“Is that even legal?” A wry smile.
“Only in four states. This isn't one
of them.”
“Hence the wine.” She raised the
glass in a mock toast and sipped. “Seriously though. Is every
artistic creation you've experienced profound?”
“There's
a lot of thoroughly unprofound
crap on the radio and TV.”
“Right. We create because we create.
We're wired for it, I think, in a pile of different ways. Sometimes
we make something that stands as a testament to a deep understanding
of the Human Condition.” She took another sip, dabbed her brush in
a bit of purplish paint, and drew a few strokes across the canvas.
“And sometimes we're just babbling.”
*
©️ 2018 B. W. Flatley
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