Tag: painting

Day #32

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Apophyge: The small hollow curvature given to the top or bottom of the shaft of a column where it expands to meet the edge of the fillet called also the scape

Prescapula: The part of the scapula in front of or above the spine or mesoscapula (like lymph node)

Donatist: A follower of Donatus the leader of a body of North African schismatics and purists who greatly disturbed the church in the 4th century They claimed to be the true church

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Picture the scene:

The artist commissioned to paint your portrait hasn’t been seen for months and has presumably disappeared with your money. Upon breaking and entering into his studio, you find a letter addressed specifically to you. It states that the artist made a deal with a spirit and rightfully fears for his life. There is no signature.

This was the exact situation that Mr William Withers found himself in on the 17th morning of March, 1863.

Withers scrunched the letter into a chrysalis with his right hand and let it fall to the stone floor. The room was dark and stagnant, dust motes hung lazily in the air as though held by invisible spider webs. A terrible stench of rotting milk pervaded the air, from the apophyge of the Doric support columns down to the crusty grout upon the floor. Withers held his handkerchief up to his nose and looked around the small, dimly lit studio. The walls were covered in paintings that had been hung about with white muslin sheets. It looked as though no-one had been here for weeks.

The devilish swine, thought Withers with indignation, jiggling the few remaining coins in his trouser pocket subconsciously. A pittance. When he found the artist, there would be more than money to repay.

As though expecting to find a clue to the artist’s location, Withers began ripping the white sheets from the paintings. He was disturbed by their content and shocked to find in each image a recognisable likeness of the artist staring back at him. A hideous half-man, half-dog creature with bulbous tumours sprouting from its prescapula and fore-shoulders. A heretic being burnt at the stake by an ebony crowd of Donatist separatists. A man stretched upon a rack covered in spikes. A wretch nailed to a crucifix atop a mountain peak, eagles with bloody beaks feasting on his gizzards.

Withers turned away, fearful and disgusted by the paintings. Yet rather than the graphic subject material, he was more alarmed by look of pain and fear that shone from the pigments of the artist’s face in each scene. So much depth and resonance; the bulging whites of the eyes, flecks of white spittle smeared across his face, taut and tense muscles that strained as though they were being ripped from the bone. It was as if he were actually feeling his tortures, as though they were more than simple paintings, but momentary glimpses into some distant occult scene.

Highly disturbed, Withers turned to leave but as his hand touched the door handle, a scream of pure agony ripped through the small studio. Drenched in a sudden cold sweat, Withers looked about the room but could see nothing. He removed his shaking hand from the handle. Averting his gaze from the uncovered paintings, Withers hurried towards the artist’s desk, grabbed the crumpled letter from the floor and shoved it in his pocket. Without looking back he left the studio, the echo of a scream forevermore ringing behind him.

Day #20

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Planimeter: a measuring instrument used to determine the area of an arbitrary two-dimensional shape.

Infucation: The act of painting or staining especially of painting the face

Undergo: To go or move below or under

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Mr Wills hadn’t left his house for two decades after returning from the war. It was for this reason, along with the honeyed windows and the reams of cigarette butts that littered his garden, that most people assumed his house was abandoned. It was just another one of those buildings that the postman delivered leftover junk mail to, the council couldn’t care less about and whose neighbours were too busy collecting their weekly giro to really pay attention to anything outside of their taxpayer funded inner sanctum.

Truth be told, this suited Mr Wills perfectly well, for he had a task to complete. It was essential that he complete this task or He would not be happy.

The elderly man got by on very little, drinking only tap water and eating only egg and cress sandwiches, but without the bread. He kept several hens in his conservatory and grew cress in every available window, so he rarely went hungry. His appearance seemed unaffected by this curious diet and so he bore the same look of any man slightly past his prime –thinning hair and greying temples, skin slackening like worn jeans and a pair of rheumy eyes that were more at ease behind a set of strong lenses.

Mr Wills spent most of his time completing his task, rarely breaking for lunch. Instead he rose early for a snack at daybreak, then finished off any leftovers before he went to bed. Mr Wills didn’t particularly like sleeping, as this was when he had to undergo the nightly status report.

He would regularly berate the elderly man for his painful fastidiousness, asking why he couldn’t speed up and when did he think the task would be done. Mr Wills, who felt he lacked the authority to speak up and say that he had never actually been told how to complete his task, instead simply dreamed of nodding. It had taken many years to perfect, but Mr Wills now knew that to pacify the voices he simply had to nod and He would slowly dissipate into the recesses of his mind, like a sea mist under a midday sun.

Sitting at his desk one morning, Mr Wills was hard at work. He would scribble wildly on a piece of paper with a fountain pen, measure the area of this arbitrary, non-Euclidean shape with a planimeter, make a note of its area in a nearby ledger and then begin the tedious infucation process. He used paints made of crushed clay and dirt, mixed with water and then dabbed lightly into different sections of the scribble – any acrylics he’d once owned had been used up years ago. He then hung the final product on the wall with a pin in each corner, taut.

These strange paintings slithered over every inch of every wall of Mr Wills’ house like snakeskin, a haunting mural .

A short while later, with russet sludge dangling from the tip of a very fine paintbrush like snot from a nostril, Mr Wills was disturbed by a sudden buzzing. It buzzed twice then stopped, so he ignored it. When it buzzed again five minutes later, Mr Wills finally realized what it was. It was his doorbell.