balconies • seventeen

canvases and coffee

sonicbrat - two moons

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He lets the brush glide through the canvas, cutting through the empty, and white space with a bold, strident black stroke. He exhales, a breath of frustration, frigidity, and contentment, as his painting had started out well. Just how he likes it. The paint was dense and heavy, as it rolls down the canvas in drips of black and onto the newspaper-based floor. He had learnt his lesson when he painted with oil; every single inch of the floor needed protection before the landlady kicks him out.

How would his painting turn out to look like today? Perhaps an abstract version of his self-portrait wasn't that easy.

He was silent, though fluent in the language of colors. The color-stained canvases had always explained his emotions. The old, worn out paintbrushes represented his passion; his love for speaking a language only few people understood.

His world was filled with abstractions; because everything that he had ever painted were abstracts themselves.

People's opinions seemed to differ when it comes to abstract art; to them, it looked like a heap of crooked lines, mismatched colors, and random blotches of paint, as if they held no artistic meaning at all.

But to Lee Jihoon, abstract art was an alternative for artists to tell their stories in their own unique way.

And, well, maybe this time he was telling his story. Jihoon's always proud to say that his art always represented a mixture of Jackson Pollock and also Mark Rothko, in which these abstract artists are well-known for their action painting and spiritual color abstraction. A little bit of Karel Appel too; who was famous for his Childish Spontaneous Abstraction, which was one of the hardest abstract paintings to define.

Childish Spontaneous Abstractions reminds Jihoon of a work he did when he was a child, though; this specific genre of abstract is called childish for a reason.

Jihoon had been scribbling on a piece of paper to vent out his frustration for years. Even since he was young. No, he didn't go through dark moments of childhood. No, his parents didn't do anything to him, they were amazing parents. It was just a skill that his father had thought him when he was a child.

When he was 12, he discovered he had synesthesia. It was truly a shocking discovery for both him and his family, since none of his family members had it before. Choromesthesia, if you asked Jihoon, was a blessing towards him, even if that meant having to see a psychologist or having one flaw inside of his brain.

It was a beautiful flaw, if you asked him. Jihoon could see sounds in colours, something that he uses to express his emotions with. It was his specialty. He would describe certain songs in colours that only he could see. Maybe that was just a Jihoon thing. Nobody could understand his paintings in terms of choice of colour. You can't expect him to blame on his synesthesia; artists should take it as a gift sometimes.

His parents didn't acknowledge his artistic skill; saying that he couldn't just randomly splatter paint onto a canvas to make a living. That was utter nonsense to them. He clearly remembered the day when he had a serious talk with both his parents, which almost turned out to be an argument over why art couldn't earn him a living.

Jihoon didn't listen to them, though. He wanted to do what he liked. Although he truly wished he did better in high school, studying just wasn't his thing. Neither a lawyer; which what his parents expected him to be.

When he locked himself up inside his room, a complex piece was created.

Jihoon named the piece chacun voit midi à sa porte, just like how the French saying goes. When his parents had disagreed with his career choice, that saying was what he told them. It meant everyone had their own way of doing things, and this was his way, his path, his choice. Its not like Jihoon's taken French before, he just picked the saying up from somewhere and held onto it ever since, waiting for the right moment to tell that to his parents.