The Color of Love

I: Hot Chocolate & Confrontations.

Ripe-apple reds and creamy, lemony yellows— like the sun pouring color into the sky before it rests for the night. They blend with the swatches of deep moss greens and dusky-bruise blues on the canvas and create whorls that both seduce and trick the eye. Zachary prefers to paint his backgrounds like this, abstract and encompassing nearly every color on the spectrum. It is much more interesting than painting every cut of shadow behind his subject, every fold of satin curtain that flutters in the evening breeze. He can have more fun with it.

From the open window, one can hear the concrete orchestra of the city below. People hailing cabs, horns blaring in traffic on their commute home, and pigeons being chased off from shitting on park benches. It smells of urine, smog and ozone, but it is home and nearly has been all of his life.

"Are you almost done?"

Zach suppresses the urge to roll his eyes. "Almost. I already told you that you could move, I'm just working on the background now."

Mary-Elizabeth huffs from her position on the settee, sprawled out like the busty women in those trashy romance novels. Beams of light from the setting sun catch in her hair, igniting the usual brunette into flares of auburn and copper. Zach had a field day finding the right mixture of russet reds and nutty browns. It is his favorite part about painting; the science behind it, the experimentation. The trial and error until eventually the perfect amount of this and that creates a perfect offspring. It could be replicated again, but not as a perfect carbon color copy. There would always be something off no matter how precise the mixture may seem— either too dull or too bright, too much light or too many shadows.

"... Are you done now?"

This time Zach does roll his eyes, but quickly masks it by pretending there is something in it. He smears cobalt blue along his cheekbone in the process. "Almost, M.E. Why don't you come take a look?"

She swings her feet off the settee, nearly skipping as she rounds the easel and peers over Zach's shoulder at his work.

"Oh my god," laments Mary-Elizabeth. "I look so pale."

This is always the difficult part about painting portraits. No matter how much they look upon their own reflection in a mirror, their image always looked foreign to them when placed on a canvas. Sure, they find humor in the over-exaggerated features of those caricatures that can be bought by starving artists on the Boardwalk, but when it comes to realism, patrons seem to want it to both look like them, but only highlight their best qualities. Apparently Mary-Elizabeth is not too fond of her fair skin.

In her defense, Zach did have to mix a lot of white to get her complexion.

Zach doesn't say this though. He stays silent as the latter scrutinizes his work further. For a moment she says nothing, yet Zach can feel his disapproval beading on the back of his neck like condensation to a glass.

"Is that what you were spending so much time on?" She gestures at the negative space of the piece. Zach can admit that he got a little carried away with it. But what a wonderful product did it make. In the center, Mary-Elizabeth in her simple autumn clothes, laid out on the off-white settee with that mysterious smile that made one want to lean in and listen to whatever juicy gossip she had. And surrounding her, lush overgrowth. Fan palm leaves flank the seat like embellishments on a ruler's throne, the backdrop an ombré of colors, starting from sunset yellows to twilit violets. She looks like a lioness, a queen of the jungle. Zach's chest swells with pride at the fact that he did this, his splattered hands evidence of it.

He has known Mary-Elizabeth since college, they sat next to each other in a photography class sophomore year. And although Zach did not take to the subject very well, Mary-Elizabeth did like a fish to water. She has always been a bit brash, a little too honest. That's what he likes about her however, she could be honest enough for the both of them. He wanted to capture her prowess, honesty, and hardheaded determination.