Do It for the Aesthetic (part 1 of 2, it's getting too long)

Claire stared at the photo in the exhibition, entranced. She looked like an angel, fallen to earth. The delicate cracks in the car, caving inwards, provided the impression that it was a cushion instead of hundreds of pounds of steel and glass. Her legs and hands lay as in elegant repose. 

‘When I die, I want to look like that.’

“Wow, that’s sad.” She heard from behind her, and turned. 

Michael was standing behind her, hands ever in his pockets. He was slumping, and he looked stoned out of his mind. 

That was par for the course for Michael, so she didn’t really feel the need to engage much. 

“Oh?” She asked politely. She thought the picture was sad, certainly, but it was just such an obvious thing to say. People dead, of suicide or otherwise, was a sad subject. But a very normal one. 

He turned to look at her with heavy-lidded eyes. “She didn’t want anyone to see her after she died. It’s wrong to have her picture everywhere.”

Claire didn’t want to dignify that with an answer. That wasn’t the job of the artist. Artists were supposed to depict as the world as it was, as it could be, as they wanted it. The subjects were part of a bigger whole. 

She rolled her eyes, and moved on. 

The other photos in the exhibition were incredible as well. The photographers had had such incredible sense of composition and color. Even the greyscales were so clear and composed that her eye could flow through the subject matter. 

She walked through the gallery, boot heels loudly clacking on the wooden floor. 

In the next room, a series of hanging paper dandelions drifted in the breeze made by patrons’ passing. A little dandelion ball fell to bump her nose, and she blew it away. This caught several others. She watched them flit away, before swinging back on their strings. 

To be honest, she wasn’t as interested in 3d art personally. She painted and drew, for the most part. 

So she didn’t linger there. Claire looked at the sculptures long enough that the other art students would consider her sufficiently sophisticated, making several evaluative throat noises and sipping at the gallery-provided beajoulais. 

Once she’d lingered long enough, she took slow but considered steps into the next series of rooms. 

Ahh… the paintings. 

She admired them with real zeal, noting the techniques. It was particularly interesting that a photorealistic painter had done a total tone shift to purple- it really changed the scene entirely. By the time she was done in that room, an hour had gone by. She had to quickly look at the drawing section and printmaking section before the gallery closed.

By the time it had shut its doors, all the other art students were emptied out on the sidewalk in a buzzed blob. They walked back to their dorms in the crisp fall air, discussing their favorite pieces. 

“See anything you particularly liked, Claire?” Drew asked, shuddering under her lined leather jacket. The soft scarf she always wore was unfurling from around her neck, and Drew had to stop to adjust it. 

“There were some pieces I liked quite a bit, yeah!” Claire felt almost giddy, actually. She’d gotten quite a bit of inspiration from that gallery exhibition. Usually First Fridays weren’t that personally appealing. 

When she got back to her apartment, she was going to have a lot to do. It was just the push she’d been looking for, to inspire her senior art exhibition. 

It was hard to choose a theme and then produce a whole exhibition’s worth. She’d been waffling before- she had been considering a series of studies inspired by the ocean. 

Twenty minutes later, she bid Drew and the others goodbye outside her apartment complex. They walked on, back onto campus without her. 

She unlocked the door to the building and half-ran up the stairs, eager to leave the cold behind her. She’d definitely left the heat on before she left, so it would be nice and warm inside her place. 

The key turned in the lock, and she was home free. No more obligations for the rest of the weekend.

Claire breathed a sigh of relief in her own apartment, smelling the homey aromas of drying oil paint and gesso. She locked the door and bolted it, before flinging her bag onto the kitchen counter. 

She took a multitude of posed selfies and did a few quick sketches in the bathroom mirror, where the lighting was best. She wanted to make sure that the details were right.

Then she drug out a mirror and a travel easel, setting it up on the tarp-covered living room floor. 

Her last reference was online- she searched out the picture from the exhibition, and saved it to her phone. 

She sketched quickly, trying to get the overall shape and feeling right. But every time she thought she had it, she stepped back and hated it. She erased it entirely at least eight times. 

The first time, the arms weren’t right. They looked stiff and like they were grabbing at something, not gently clasping. Then the face looked creepy and scared instead of peaceful.

The perspective was a whole other issue- did she want to flip it? Recreating the thing exactly was hacky. She re-drew it, but this time from a downwards angle. 

Yeah, that looked better.

Then she went right to her easel and prepped her paints. It was dark, so she brought out her clip can lights to help out. 

Then she looked at the mirror, and began to sketch out some of the details of her own face. 

Claire didn’t know how long she’d been working, but she ran out of juice sometime in the middle of the night. She covered her paints, washed her brushes, and passed out in her clothes on the couch next to the easel. 

That night, she had the weirdest dreams. She couldn’t remember what they were, but when she woke, her heart was beating so fast Claire thought it would tear right out of her chest. 

It was light out, at least. She squinted at the window and rolled off the couch. 

The parking lot below was empty, which meant that a lot of other students had gone home for the weekend. 

Weirdly, that rich asshole kid with a monster truck still had it parked in the lot. It took up three spaces. 

Claire mildly regretted going to a private university. She let herself wallow in that feeling for about a minute, then went to make herself a coffee and some eggs. 

After she ate, she went right back to work. 

The paint seemed to flow so easily whenever she actually had the feel for her subject. It felt like it had been months since she’d last had some real interest in painting. The tedium of the required classes and artwork had really taken a bite out of her interest to do art at all. 

Maybe that was the point? People dropped the program all the time, due to the enormous time commitment for no real possibility of financial or social gain. Only people who were committed enough stayed. The others just couldn’t hack it, frankly. 

Claire decided that this painting was done for the moment- she needed to let the oil dry and then make some more adjustments. That would take at least two days, probably. 

She picked it up carefully and deposited it against the wall, so that it didn’t get paint on the ugly wallpaper. 

She stepped back to admire it from the couch.

Okay, it had a good sense of movement. It looked alright. It was lacking the… etherealness that she was going for at the moment, but she hadn’t anticipated getting that right immediately. 

The face had gotten a bit blurry and needed the details retouched. That would be better to do after the skin colors dried. 

All in all, not a bad job. She nodded to herself in the mirror on the easel before getting out the next canvas. 

On Monday, she drug her sorry ass to class with reluctance. She’d left a room full of partially painted canvasses and her temporary muse. 

‘I just know it’s gonna be a pain to get back into doing all that work. And art theory class is just so painful, anyway.’

True to form, she slid in just before the clock said she was late. Fifteen minutes later, Michael shuffled in. 

Professor Garcia just looked at him. It wasn’t worth being upset about. Michael was never on time, regardless of the fact that he obviously had a time machine available to steal the abandoned clothes at key parties in the 1970’s. Today it was fairly tame- a corduroy and flannel look with the wide rimmed glasses she associated with serial killers. Of course, regardless of the fact that he had been specifically taught color theory, the shirt, pants, scarf, and socks all clashed horrendously. 

They discussed postmodern aesthetics- in that Professor Garcia prodded them to make comments about their opinions and understanding, and they grumpily tried to avoid her gaze. Michael made a point about postmodernism rejection of ‘art for art’s sake and artistic purity’ and Claire had to restrain herself from rolling her eyes. 

Drew was leaned back in her chair, half-asleep. She was lucky that Claire was blocking Professor Garcia’s view.

Claire tapped a 4b pencil on her notepad. She hadn’t been able to find a cheap mechanical one before she left that morning- her stuff was everywhere. She’d pretty thoroughly wrecked her apartment in pursuit of painting. 

It didn’t matter. She wasn’t actually going to take notes. The pencil was a polite concession to society and her professor’s esteem. Sometimes if she made a particularly strong point, Claire pretended to write something down. Usually it was a short note for her friends, or an item on a to do list. 

Class ended about half an hour later, and they all sullenly filed out. She didn’t have any more classes today, as her senior seminar was self-study. Tomorrow, she’d need to present her new idea to the senior show cooperative class for constructive critique. 

She swung by the campus cafeteria for lunch, making sure that she got way extra carrots and hummus to put in the tupperware hidden in her backpack. She took about four trips up to the food area to get enough food for that day and tomorrow morning, and ate a black bean burger with some fries. 

Surprisingly, the fries were pretty fresh and hot. Normally everything under the heat lamps was soggy and limp. 

Claire cleared her tray and left, excited to get back to work on her paintings. 

They were right where she left them. She looked at them with fresh eyes, and was kind of disappointed. 

‘I thought these were a lot better this morning.’

Dejected, she went to putting away her takeaway food and washing dishes. She wiped down the kitchen before going into her bedroom and picking up the dirty laundry all over the floor of her closet. 

She checked her pockets for loose change, which was a little optimistic given that she had no job outside of her work study hours. All that money went directly to her rent. Everything else was loans and scraping by. 

She did find a few loose items, including the mechanical pencil she hadn’t been able to find that morning. It had been in one of her hoodies. 

Claire chucked it in the direction of her backpack and dumped the clothes in the washing machine. Hot water streamed down the sides as she poured soap in. 

Ugh, that was running low again, too. Claire noted it and dismissed it. She’d be fine for another week or two. 

She wiped down the bathroom and scrubbed the toilet, because she was on a cleaning high. If she put it off, she didn’t know when she’d feel like doing it again. 

Claire looked around at her apartment. It was pretty clean, now, by her standards. She should probably vacuum, but she could do that after some more work on her paintings. 

She pulled the first painting up and onto the easel, and sat down. 

When she stood up, it was dark. Her hands were covered in paint. In the moonlight, it looked slick and bloodlike. 

‘Yikes.’

She went to wash her hands and arms in the kitchen sink, surprised at how far up her arms the mess went. 

Her eyes adjusted to the dark, and she realized that now it was definitely too late to vacuum. She’d get reported to her landlord if she made that kind of noise past 6. The woman who lived downstairs was kind of a bitch. 

Instead, she changed into a clean but well-worn cotton shirt and some sweatpants. There was some cold pizza in the fridge, so she microwaved that and made tea. Then she hauled it all into her bedroom, where she ate dinner in front of her laptop. 

She crawled into bed at some point, bored of endless and pointless browsing. As she went to sleep, she couldn’t help but feel mildly uneasy. Her stomach was roiling and she felt like something was sitting on her chest. 

Class tomorrow was going to be horrible. She resolved to email in sick if she didn’t think her project was going well. She didn’t want to present something bad and get publicly reamed for it. Professor Lee was infamously harsh, and she didn’t feel up for that. 

She tried to readjust until she felt comfortable, finally putting her hands on her chest. It seemed to slow her heart rate down. 

She fell asleep.

In the morning, she felt even worse. Her chest felt shattered, and every part of her ached. She must have been tensing all night. 

With an enormous amount of effort, Claire managed to climb out of her bed and email her teacher. Doubtless Professor Lee would think she was full of shit and not whatever demon illness had smacked her down overnight, but she also wouldn’t care enough to call her out on it. 

The idea of food sounded horrible, but the prospect of not getting caffeine was full of danger. She’d have a headache before noon. 

Claire settled on coffee and a slice of bread as a concession. Without something solid, the acid in the coffee would probably make whatever was going on with her stomach so much worse. 

The paintings seemed to stare at her, silently condemning her and her lack of artistic talent and drive. 

God, she felt like a failure. The only thing worse than being an artist in poverty was a being a bad artist in poverty. 

She corrected herself. It wasn’t about the money. The money would probably never come. It was about art for its own sake. It was more noble than just a transaction. 

It had to be, didn’t it?

Claire went to lie down on the couch in her sweats, stretching out over the thin cushions. She stared up at the popcorn ceiling. 

Some of the clumps of paint looked like things, much like cloud spotting. The one by the window kind of looked like a puppy. The water damage above the kitchen sink was in the shape of a butterfly.

She tried to find more, hoping that it would help her feel more creative. Having to fit her mind around things that were there and impose form and purpose on them always seemed to help her with her projects. 

Oh. 

She squinted. The area above her head looked like a skyscraper, if she looked at it right. 

Good. That was good. She tried to find more. 

After about twenty minutes, she’d found a flower, a baby, a car, an angel, and a small stain in the shape of a butt. 

Not particularly inspiring, but oddly satisfying. 

Her stomach had settled a bit. Claire stretched her hands and popped her fingers before sitting up. 

The canvasses were waiting. 

She lost herself in the paint, finally perfecting the feel for it. She could feel the energy of it, like she was the focus of the painting, merely becoming a channel for paint and expression.

It was about hopelessness and beauty- the wind whipping at her face, the release. 

She painted for hours, cleaned up most of the paint on her amrs in the shower, and passed out in her underwear. 

Claire woke up the next morning feeling invigorated, and as she passed by the easel she paused to take in her work. 

The long legs were graceful, the cracking lifted up to the sky. Her subject looked like an angel, fallen to earth, with glowing skin. 

A shiver started up Claire’s spine. 

Evidently she’d made a mistake last night in painting. 

The woman was screaming. It looked like there was a little rivulet of blood falling out of her terrified mouth. 

Christ. She’d need to fix that later. 

“I can’t with this.” She said out loud, feeling a bit ill.

She remembered what Michael had said about the picture earlier. Maybe that was coloring her feelings? 

“You’re just a painting. My painting.” She said out loud, with more conviction than she really felt. “You don’t get to have feelings.”

Some artists did subscribe to that idea. Some paintings were just waiting to be painted the way they liked, statues hid in chunks of marble. 

But Claire didn’t like the idea of that. 

The woman kept screaming, regardless of Claire’s admonition. It felt like she was looking at her. 

Claire felt a twist in her stomach that wasn’t hunger. She blinked, hard, to will it away. 

It didn’t work. 

The woman screamed. 

Claire felt hot and angry. All that time painting, all her work, and it was wrong. It couldn’t be wrong.

She picked up a brush and squirted white oil on it, jabbing it over the woman’s mouth. 

“You don’t get an opinion.” Claire growled. Even as she said it, she felt like it was an outsized reaction. But how had it gone so wrong? 

She felt like a failure- it burned, white hot on her face. 

Claire turned on her heel and stomped out of the apartment. She needed to be somewhere else. 

She walked around campus feeling sour for about half an hour then went to the art building for her work study hours. 

It was cold. It was cool that this was one of the original buildings on campus, but it meant that the heating was absolute crap. She shivered. 

On the first floor, she could hear someone in the ceramics labs. The pottery wheels were obviously going, but there wasn’t a class. Technically, it was her  job to see if they needed anything. 

She stalked into the room- there was no one in the connected metal/sculpture lab, and no one at the work tables. That was good. 

Off to the right, Michael was working on one of his many hideous vases. 

That was his thing- useful objects made useless. Vases with purposeful cracks, mugs folded in on themselves (but with working handles), plates covered with little ceramic spikes. 

He didn’t really need her help, but she found herself lingering anyway. 

“How’s it going?” She called, not too loudly. She didn’t want to make him ruin anything. It really sucked when that happened. 

He looked up slowly, like those videos of sloths she often saw on the internet. 

“It’s good.” He said, then looked back down. 

‘I honestly don’t know what I expected.’

She sighed. “So your senior show stuff is going ok? Mine is a tragedy.”

He stopped the wheel slowly, and cut his piece off the wheel with wire. She watched him carefully lift it to a table, where he began to contemplatively push in on certain parts, effectively crushing it. 

It had previously been a gorgeous and delicate cylinder with room enough for a bouquet. After the destruction, it would be lucky if you could weasel one daisy stem into it. 

“Technical difficulties, or ideas?” He asked, obviously only somewhat engaged. 

She watched his back, as he began to position it for air drying. 

“I have an idea… but it’s not really working.” She said, leaning back onto a stool. “I was using that photo from the exhibition Friday as inspiration, but it always looks more scary than I want it.”

He huffed. “Told you so.”

She felt herself twitch. “You did not, and what does what she wanted have to do with it?”

He levelled eyes with her, which was kind of intimidating, because he never seemed to really directly look at anyone. It was surprisingly intense. 

“You shouldn’t use unwilling models.” He enunciated. “It’s bad luck.”

“But it’s in galleries and museums!” She exclaimed in frustration. “Why can’t I reference it? It’s famous. It has to be ok.”

He shook his head. “They shouldn’t have done that, either. But it’s wrong for you to use her, too. I can’t imagine she would like it.”

“Who cares what she wanted?” She bit out, knowing it sounded harsh. “That’s not what my piece is about. It’s about the aesthetic.”

He shrugged. “No one’s telling you you can’t. I’m just saying you shouldn’t. There has to be something else you can do that isn’t using a source material that is actively disrespectful.”

That was the most she’d ever heard him say at once. It was annoying. 

He might be right though… it was kind of disrespectful to use someone’s suffering for her own gain. 

She thought about that, after he left. She helped some freshmen with their drawing assignments, and helped someone else with their digital photo editing for a few hours. 

But by the time she finally left the building at one, she didn’t quite think it applied. It wasn’t like she was explicitly using this woman’s image or her face. It was Claire’s own, a series of self portraits that showed the malleability of what seemed concrete. 

When she got home, she threw her keys and bag onto the kitchen counter and got back to work. 

The next thing she knew, she was up to her arms in paint. She was barefoot, and her room was a mess of canvas. 

Finally, they were perfect. They were just what she wanted- a picturesque view of death. It was beautiful, and ethereal, and exactly what she had imagined. Her heart ached for the perfection of it. 

The idea of being remembered forever for your beauty in some way, that was always the goal. In painting, in music, in your looks… wasn’t that what everyone wanted?

Claire at least knew that’s what she wanted. And she’d done it. 

Her central piece was life-size. Claire’s own face, in repose, was at the very center. 

And none of them looked like they were screaming. 

She smiled, satisfied, and went to bed with a clear head.