aesthetics

Contrast

Prologue - Contrast

Atmospheric Songs:
Falling Slowly - Once The Musical

I was an admirer. I would sit in awe, surrounded by the rough sketches of inked lead strewn across stark white pages. I would wonder, the gentle strokes of fragile tans and soft, humble reds, so innocent it would make you seem some sort of devil and the canvas some sort of God. That one touch of your dirty finger pads would send it into some form of impurity, all it's worth lost.

I'd admire because I did not possess the talent that he did.

I'd admire, eyes alight with the fire of curiosity and jaw slightly ajar in wonder.

I'd admire, because I could only dream of acquiring such a skill to express emotions through colour and texture. That a two dimensional canvas held such a three dimensional feeling with substance.

Yet if I could not do as such, I'd admire.

Watch him succumb to the art of getting lost with the soothing music lightly filtering around the room; paint tubs, pencils and brushes in every nook and cranny. As the morning broke through the small window to the right and warmth seeping through, I watched his hands flutter across paper and canvases, while mine scribbled words on lined pages in a constant blur of figuring out the perfect words to describe the beauty before me, yet nothing proved to serve him any justice.

He was a masterpiece. An open book, a glass building, a window to the soul that did not only begin and end at his eyes, but reached down the whole length of his body.

Every inch of his being would radiate. His smile would grow beautiful flowers in my lungs until I lose my breath and must finally look away, it is then that I realise that all things beautiful hurt, like a thorn on a rose.

His daring eyes made you want to live, to be ambitious, to cross all of the world's borders and free fall into love. His emerald gaze would egg you on, 'live a little,' they would mock, and so you would. But the adrenaline was too pleasing and so was his eyes, so you would go back for more every time.

The green spheres that appear whenever I lower my lids and the jade stare that would often glance at my unknowing self, ghosting his presence long after he were physically gone.

I was a writer. Contrary to popular belief, it was not all little coffee shops and beachside walks that finally put pen to paper or finger to key.

But it was the 2am mornings, drinking crappy coffee on your lounge, seven colder cups littered around the floor, the table, the bench, everywhere, plucking every word that came to your mind and jotting it down before it slips through your desperate and grasping fingers once again.

It was googling the strongest tea and having half drunken cups of it scattered around your apartment like the scattered words you couldn't form into sentences resting on the tip of your tongue, but you swallow them because they're useless.

It was finally hitting the 5000 word mark but then having the paper shoved back into your palms, your thoughts no longer worth any value as they were not typed in size 12, Times New Roman font with 1.5cm line spacing.

But it all adds up, when you can write metaphors about the feeling of his hair between your fingers, or use emotive language to describe his arms that were your permanent home. It's the string of ink you leave behind when your mind flows your thoughts straight to your hands, by passing doubt and retraction, revealing the most beautiful, candour forms of text.

He was a painter. The slow, rhythmic movements of his brush were my words. Instead of copious amounts of English writing, he would create works of art, any and all viewers could perceive, no matter their language.

The colours mixed and matched to create euphoria on a canvas. The swirls and crosshatches all adding together to create a definite meaning, evoking unseen emotions from me, sending fast pulses through my veins, tingling in my fingers and shivers down my spine.

He once said to me, 'art is so powerful, in the way that the painting before your eyes can take on seven different meanings, the piece next to it? seventy-seven polar opposite perceptions, although each one were valid in their own unique ways.'

It always struck him how colours slashed together on a drunken Tuesday night rage could turn into a million dollar creation over night.

That your heartbreak could be expressed in a few paint strokes and an array of hues in the shades blues, black and grey.

It awed him how art was so powerful. How one thought to take the bright, yellow paint and to instead paint the bleached canvas, paint his insides in a clutching attempt to rid of the imaginary greys swallowing his life.

He believed art was so powerful, it could bring, but also tear apart, love.

And so did I.