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5D AUTISM SPEX posted:prompt: nothing Painting I hadn't been in a museum since a class field trip that I can only place in some later portion of my middle school career, in my memory consisting of only soft impressions of an unseasonably cool day, a thin wind blowing off of Lake Michigan and a passive, dull sunlight that could have belonged to any given day in May filtering through a smear of cloud cover to illuminate a spacious top-floor gallery with the sort of soft natural lighting that one associates more with a department store garden center than the art gallery it was intended to contain. The light was no different this time, in spite of the 18-or-so years between then and now; white, downy, isolating, casting a translucent fog throughout. Starch white walls punctuated at intervals with canvases of pieces done in the classical style, bordered from beneath by shiny woodgrain floorboards, a look I would have described as "minimalist" in the right (read: incredulous) company, although my only basis for calling it that being that there was a high polish over little detail. If I'm being truthful I don't possess any knowledge of style, or art generally, which is why I've avoided it by talking about lighting instead of describing the paintings, which flew by me now as ever in a blur of vaguely recalled subjects: men and women working a field; a girl and her dog on the beach, perhaps they were looking out over the water, or was there a dog at all?; Christ in his wretched agony; probably some other arrangements so revisited that maybe I had seen some of these more than once on my way up to this room, and that's the only reason I recall them now. I blinked my eyes deep and hard. My self awareness snagged the flow of my consciousness and I wondered to myself, first, how I had got here, second, why, and third, whether or not I should at least attempt to 'get' something out of this; it's an 'experience,' after all, and I don't seem to have many of those these days; how did I end up here? I felt my chest heave out with a breath to make room for an ever-present melancholic ache that occasionally motivates me to do these sorts of things, 'going out' to 'treat myself' to something outside of my usual routine. The gentle echoing clack of a woman's heels snapped me back into reality for a moment. I glanced around at the other admirers, patrons, wondering if there were some kind of signal that would give away the ones who were really feeling something against the ones who were just pretending to, found nothing of the sort, and concluded that there was a possibility that simply all of them were faking it. My attention was drawn to some impressively tall statuary in the middle of the gallery whose shape I now fail to remember, except that its presence is a deep and spindly impression of a shadow, so for the sake of illustration I will say that it was a gnarled tree or some abstract tower, whichever pleases you. The thought passed my mind that perhaps one has to put something of oneself in to get something else out, and I couldn't determine if that thought was profound or simply obvious and declared myself pretty hopeless if I couldn't tell the difference, but resolved to move to some other part of the gallery, somewhere fresh and untarnished by this state of mind, to try and really /observe/ a piece /in situ/. I repeated this process three times in turn. As before, these pieces made no impression on me. Humans doing things in vistas that could have been impressive if they were real places, probably. I found a small gallery room unoccupied by at least one dimension of person and took a seat on a bench of dark, highly polished stone that I assume bore a dedication to some patron or another - I didn't look - and put thumb and forefinger to the bridge of my nose, knuckle to the bridge of my glasses, trying to hold at bay a frustration welling up that went beyond mere self-judgement at my own pretentiousness (or lack thereof.) I breathed deeply, slowly, and traced the wood grain floor through blurred and mucous vision, to the baseboard, up the wall and to the frame of a portrait. My brow furrowed and with determination looked through it as though it were a window. I replaced my glasses and it came into focus. It was a woman, nameless to me. The artist had brought her into the world from the middle of her waist up and hidden the rest of her. The ache had returned to my chest. I stood and moved closer, staring through the canvas at the being within. The room had grown deathly quiet around me. Footsteps and murmurs that had occupied the backchannels of my bare consciousness faded into the obscurity of the mist that surrounds a focused mind. The lady wore red. The deep scarlet of dried roses enveloped her up to her bosom; shoulders bare, a natural tan; long, ruddy colored formal gloves midway up her biceps, hands folded pensively across her waist; deep brown hair of significant length but wrapped in a tight bun in a style I can only describe as being of Spanish origin, crowned by a single, impressively large carnation held in place behind one ear. She stood against a featureless background of deep azure lightened to a halo of sky blue closer to her body. Something just out of the frame held her attention in a solemn gaze. Glistening tears left a path across her cheeks, the only place on her person that seemed to capture the blue surrounding her; everything else about her seemed to reject it, but it thrived in her pain. I felt a hand crawl up the side of my head and gently take hold of my hair. I recognized it as my own hand, with searching fingers seeking to grasp, to possess, in that moment. I stood very still for a very long time, breathing.
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May 7, 2017 03:32
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| # ¿ Apr 28, 2024 15:03 |
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r/WritingPrompts is the worst subreddit. Yes, even worse than r/the_donald.
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Jun 26, 2017 02:51
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