Thrils

"Thrils"

It was late at night, a crisp winter. I was covered by soft sheets and cozy socks, white and blue with silver stars on them. I flicked through the pages and gazed at the images for the hundredth time, as the raindrops tapped my window I gazed at the crack where water seeped in whenever it rained, whenever condensation built up. I stroked my fingers though the cold window and attempted to draw the face, one line at a time as, whenever I stopped the drop would precipice, gravity pulling down like a tear in a face.

I followed the blue line that formed that face, the famous face from which he’d receiveD acclamation, the face that I thought looked broken, shattered and seemed trapped. The stripes of blue and yellow galavanted and formed the shape of that tortured face. Simple lines over layers and layers of paint of indiscribile colours, that I could never recreate in a window. I focused on that mane line. I can’t remember where I began but I remember I followed with the cheekbones and made a left turn downwards to crate the jaw line, a simple line that I felt, made the portrait more painful, then closed the line to create the shape of the skull and, without lifting my numbed finger, quickly and unskillfully drew the eye. I lifted the finger and as the drop formed a tear of water, I revealed the window doodle to myself and admired how it looked nothing like the it. I returned to the coziness of my wool sheets and admired the following pages of that book, once again. I laid my eyes on all the creatures that he created, I say created because I believe no one has ever constructed anything like them, no one has ever seen such trepidus nightmarish creatures, portraying both angels and demons who all share a particular trait. To my unskilled eye they seem agonizingly famished, hungry not for food but for something... Peace? Love? Sanity? Freedom?

The images in that book captured me, a thirteen year old girl trapped in her own mind controlled by crippling shyness, a tender sorrow age where everything seems uneventful. However, I metamorphosed like a butterfly. Actually it wasn’t that dramatic. Regardless, that image made my person fully packed with eventfulness, thrilled for discovery. I discovered a new artist (I naively thought he was my discovery) and felt the thrill I felt when I heard Louis Armstrong “Blueberry Hill” lyrics and believed “the moon stood still on blueberry hill”, or when I fully understood the brilliantly whimsical rhymes of Dr. Seuss.

I assume that is the thrill artists live of off. The way they can make incalculable audiences feel as if the art they delivered was a personal love letter that evolved in meaning through time. The intimacy transmitted through a photograph, a lyric, a poem or a painting lingers in one's mind and attaches itself to it, no matter how young, how old or how inexperienced. As time goes by, their art has a different value to us mortals. It is a memory, an instance where everything changed, an instance where nothing changed, a shared bond with a father, the incomprehensible passion of a sister, the sorrow sadness of a mother. I will always remember how I felt the day I saw his painting, I for now enjoy feeling the same way whenever I revisit his work, and in the future, when all has changed, I will commemorate this feeling.

-MTP