Classroom X

day four: appreciation

The art room of Dom Adams was quaint and spacious, with a wood-panelled floor and dozens of sash windows breaking up the faded walls, allowing in an abundance of sunlight. The art room always had perfect lighting, artful lighting: soft sunlight slanting in through the windows in the morning, the buttery rays of the evening sun soaking up everything in warm yellow, and the grey absence of it on rainy days, making them see the chill in the air—it was all pretty and peaceful, it was all good enough to paint. It was just that, August thought he could never paint anything pretty or peaceful.

He was sitting on a high stool by the window, a blank canvas before him, an even blanker expression on his face. When he thought he'd stared out of the window in listlessness for long enough, he turned his gaze inwards and affixed it on the tubes of oil paint scattered about the legs of the easel, counting how many shades he owned, making an inventory of the colours he'd used up—black and red, mostly—and the ones that had gone missing. When he thought he had had enough of that, he brought his eyes to the wet brush in hand, poised in front of the bare white canvas, dripping paint that was the pinkest of pinks. Today, August was determined to paint something that was not "twisted" or "unsettling" or "horrifying".

Much luck he was having.

Chairs and easels had been lined up to the sides, but there were at least six or seven works in progress about the room, paintings the other art students must have planned to complete one of these days, but had to abandon because of the lockdown.

From where he was sitting August had a good enough angle of most of the unfinished paintings. He couldn't guess where the painters were going with most of them, which was fine, because if completed works of art distorted reality to extreme and magnificent extents and were obscure about the meanings of the brushstrokes, incompleted ones had to be more so.

The one closest to him was wholly blue—cobalt and azure and smudged cerulean—like someone had taken a brush to a moody sky and swished hither and tither, swirling its colours. It looked like there was a city hidden behind the front—August couldn't be sure. Maybe it was water, or reflections on glass, or a bunch of boxes and box-sized ladders rendered in blue; August didn't have a clue. Maybe the painter had no clue himself.

This painting was peaceful: no grimness, no chaos. No Fear or Abyss or Torment. It was calming, because blue was calming, and August thought he could keep looking at it forever.

The one further back was an unfinished still of a bowl of fruits. It was an art class assignment. August could see an apple, a pear, a bunch of grapes and blushing cherries. Standard painting. Nothing stood out about it.

Again, there was another painting of a wheat field—a sprawling expanse of golds and browns and burnt white, stretching towards an unreachable horizon. Ravens soared above the field, dappling the pearl sky with misshapen blots of black. August liked the ravens.

He touched his brush to his canvas, pink bleeding onto white, like a spreading drop of watered down blood. He liked that, how it reminded him of blood. Maybe this wasn't a hopeless endeavor from the start, maybe he really could get somewhere with this. But his hand was frozen, doubtful, indecisive, not knowing what to do next. What had he been going to draw?
Flowers? Butterflies? He could draw none of that.

Didn't I warn you? Gawain's voice was whispering in his head, low and murmuring like a stream at night. Didn't I warn you to stay away from Sake?

The brush trembled in his hand. It had been nearly an hour ago when Gawain  uttered those words in his ear. An hour ago after his friend had displayed August's paintings before the whole class, accused him before all of them. Gawain's eyes had been like a snake's, smile purely malignant.