The Painting of Fleeting Time

It was time to give up. Maria had poured thousands of hours of her life into her art, and now she finally had to come to terms with the fact that she would never amount to anything as an artist. She had excelled in art class in school as a kid, and that was why she made the decision to go to an arts college way above her budget. Her parents were skeptical, but Maria knew that as soon as she graduated, she would be successful enough to pay off her debts. The expensive degree was an investment in her future. Her professors said her work was technically accurate, but that never got her more than average grades. “Art should make you feel something!” Professor Littenburg had insisted, in justification of the C sprawled across the top of Maria’s semester-long project that she had poured her heart and soul into. Maria considered turning in that blood-red C for her final project the next semester. Just looking at it made her stomach shrivel up, her pulse quicken with fury, tears well in her eyes.

In spite of it all, she scraped through graduation. Without any job prospects lined up, she worked a handful of odd jobs- waitressing, bartending, grocery cashier, all to scrape through the most pressing of her bills, but she kept most of her time her own to keep pursuing art. Two years post-graduation, Maria had stacked up a concerning total owed across six credit cards, paid off none of the debt incurred by her degree, the fridge was empty, and on top of it all, the lights had gone out again. Hadn’t she paid the power bill this time? But no, she had been running low on oil paints and had restocked those instead. Because still, in spite of it all, she created. She watercolored. She sculpted. She threw paint at a canvas in her frustration, and yet not a single person wanted to buy her art. It was bad when the little art gallery for local artists in her neighborhood sent her a letter to explain that due to a consistent lack of sales, her display would be removed from their shop. It was worse when she sat at her table at the local farmers’ market and watched people’s eyes glaze over as they walked past, like they didn’t even notice her paintings between the taco stand and the knitted tops next door. Her emotions, so raw on the canvas in her own eyes, fell flat in the eyes of the rest of the world. At what point had she tortured herself enough?

It was on that night when the lights went out yet again that Maria set herself an ultimatum. Or rather, The Tapestry did, when the proprietor, John, called “to have a chat.” She knew what that meant. She had been through the same with the local gallery that had only last month made her pick up all of her displayed items to make room for a more promising, upcoming artist. She had thought The Tapestry, a much larger shop, would hold onto her artwork longer, but apparently they had a time limit, as well. The message from John during their conversation was straight forward enough. She needed to hit a minimum of five hundred dollars in sales by the end of the month, or she was out of their gallery, as well. Maria balked. She wasn’t sure she’d even hit that in the two years since she had begun selling her artwork. She pulled the phone away from her ear to open up the calendar app. “By the end of next month? So that leaves me with-”

John cut her off. “By the end of this month.” His voice was soft. Apologetic. He had always been kind to her. “That leaves you with six days.”

Maria tried to respond, but her throat was dry and words wouldn’t come. John muttered something, but Maria had stopped listening. She hung up the phone and sat on the barstool at her counter, willing herself not to cry. She had six days to convince the world that someone needed her art. And if she couldn’t, then it was time to give up being an artist forever.

Maria thought through her options. She could go to the gallery and try to convince someone to buy her work. She wasn’t that bold. She could pay someone to buy her work. But of course, if she could afford to do that, she wouldn’t be watching the kitchen go dark around her. Maybe what she needed was one last masterpiece. She would put everything she had into one last painting, and hope that this feeling of desperation would give her work a new depth to catch someone’s eyes.

She set to work, canvas lit by an old camping lantern she found in a musty box in the back of the closet. The flickering light intensified her feeling of urgency, but she didn’t let the gravity of her situation swallow her up, tried not to think about how this would either be the start or the end of her career, as she mixed paints furiously and lined up the very best of her brushes. As the night progressed, she began to feel the paints more than she saw them, through the sputtering light of the lantern. She had never felt quite this way while working before, like the painting was emerging in pieces all of its own accord.

She was so entranced by the process that she was surprised when a wan beam of sunlight crossed the canvas. As the morning light forced its way into her kitchen-turned-studio, she stood back to reflect on her creation. It was unlike anything she had painted before, paint swirled into enigmatic beings that had become vessels for her anger and fear of what awaited in her not-so-distant future. It felt like urgency and passing time blotted together into longing. She finally thought she could understand what her old artwork was missing. Painting in the dark had allowed her to forge a new connection between her emotions and her brushes, the result giving the impression that she had reached a fist inside herself to fish out something true, honest, raw, and arrange it on the canvas. It took her own breath away.

Maria sat entranced until the sunlight was bouncing through the entire kitchen and reaching into the hall behind her, and she finally shook herself into motion. She would need to clean herself up while the paint dried, and after that she would bring the painting down to the gallery. Maria thought back to her promise to herself that if this didn’t sell, she would give up her dream of being an artist. But when she dropped the washcloth from her face and saw the reflection of her finished product in the mirror, she couldn’t help but think she wouldn’t need to worry about that.

She’d hoped John would be at The Tapestry that afternoon when she went to hang her newest creation in her display area, but there was only a teenager there, headphones on, hat backwards, skateboard propped against the “You break it, you buy it” sign, scrolling away on his phone. She was sure he couldn’t tell a Picasso from a middle schooler’s scribbling. She walked to her display area and picked an old favorite painting, meaningful to her but apparently not to anyone else, and swapped it out with the new painting. She stepped back to admire it, right in the center of all her lesser paintings and ceramics. She was sure the new addition would draw everyone’s eyes as soon as they walked into the room.

Nothing to do now but wait. She considered hanging around to talk to customers coming in, but the prospect made her palms sweat so she headed back home, instead. Maybe she could scrounge up enough coins under the couch cushions to pay the electric bill before the few bits of food in her fridge went bad. She tucked her older painting into the passenger seat for the drive home, glancing at it again as she did. It was an abstract from a year ago, and it was the first piece after two months of not painting anything worth keeping. She had hit a wall of sorts where everything she tried to create felt forced. She had been trying too hard to make something good, and in the process, had made nothing more than expensive trash, pouring hundreds of dollars of canvas, clay, and all varieties of paints into the dumpster in the alley. This painting had come in the days after her dad died. They hadn’t been close for years; she had long ago disappointed him for the last time, but his death still hit her hard. The painting oozed sadness, regret clawing its way from the brushes to her canvas. It still hurt, looking at her own work. But time had dulled the sharp edges of her grief, and apparently her work still hadn’t made anyone else feel. Not enough to buy it, anyway. Maybe, Maria thought as she slid the painting into her closet that evening, maybe she needed to paint happier things. Maybe that’s what the people wanted.

Maria didn’t expect a call from the studio that night, so she wasn’t surprised when the next day passed without a call, either. And then the next. And then there were only three days left, and maybe waiting at home wouldn’t be enough, anymore. She had been passing the time making little clay figurines, sculpting miniature animals and lining them up like a stop motion, each new animal telling the next line in the story. Her favorite was a series of snails, depicted going up and down a tree, a little hobo sack slung across the back of his shell, with obscenely human facial expressions on each of his iterations. They were a world away from what she usually made, but she felt too tapped out from the last painting and the stress of the week to invest anything more into a project. With two days left, Maria headed down to The Tapestry to set up a display with her new critters. The best she could find to display them on was a rickety old table, which she thought rather cheapened the quality of all the other work. But she had to add something else. She was feeling rather desperate. Maria had to admit that she had come here to check on the new painting, more so than set up a display of snails. It still hung on the wall, in pride of place, now right above the display of critters, and it did in fact draw her eyes immediately. But maybe she was biased.

There were quite a few people milling about through the artwork and Maria considered discussing her artwork with them, but she had never been good at selling herself. She wasn’t good at being rejected right to her face, and she knew more people came through to browse than to buy. She went instead to talk to John, who was manning the desk, just to confirm that she’d had no new sales. He didn’t even mention her new painting and Maria couldn’t bring herself to ask. She was fighting back tears of frustration as she made her way to the door, bumping into a small child and his father as she rushed through the doors in her hurry to escape the scene of her many failures.

Desperation clawed at Maria like a feral cat the next morning, and by the afternoon, it had morphed into the claws of a rabid racoon. Only one day left, and she would have run out of avenues to sell her art. Maybe she should start a website. If she widened her audience, maybe she could finally drum up some interest. But she didn’t know the first thing about web design or marketing, so she started a water color instead. Twenty-six hours, and she would be on the hunt for a new job.

The phone rang.

“John? You told me I still had one more day.”

“You’re off the hook.” Warm, sweeping relief flooded through Maria. It had sold. Someone had bought her painting. “I wouldn’t feel too comfortable though,” John continued, but Maria cut him off.

“I knew that painting would sell! I just felt that it was good. Who bought it? Can I get their information? Maybe they want to commission another one. And to think, I was about to quit art for good.”

“I- You know-” John stopped and took a deep breath before continuing on, sounding much less excited than the situation warranted. “Maria, don’t forget that you need to make ongoing sales to keep your artwork displayed in our gallery. A one-off won’t be enough to float on.”

But Maria was hardly listening. All of her hard work had finally paid off. “What did they say when they bought it? Did they say what they liked about the painting?”

John sighed heavily, and Maria thought that he wouldn’t answer. But after a long pause, he said, “About a dozen of the ceramic animals sold, as well. So you can come by with some more work, to fill out the gaps in your display. But like I said, we need to see consistent sales over time, not all in one day.”

Maria was still grinning, ear to ear. At last, someone had seen her worth. Her value. She just hoped the pressure of becoming so popular all at once didn’t slow down her ability to create.

***

James sat in the kitchen, drowning in enough of his own misery to no longer register the sound of his son Isaac’s tears through the bedroom door. He knew he shouldn’t punish his son for an accident, but he didn’t know how he was going to tell his wife, and he didn’t know how he was supposed to pay their rent this month. He had run his fingers through his dark curly hair so many times in the past hour that the curls were nearly straight. He tugged a loose curl and wrapped it around his finger as he looked at the heavy canvas leaning against the otherwise bare living room wall. It was just so ugly. Even before Isaac had tripped over the table and brought all the ceramic crashing and bouncing down around him, even before he had grabbed the gawdy old frame and somehow managed to pull the painting down with him, even before the canvas tore between Isaac’s knee and the jagged edge of shattered ceramic leaving a gash across the center, James had thought the thing ugly. Who in their right mind would spend five hundred dollars on such a disorganized mess of paint? James squinted his eyes, tilted his head, and still could make neither heads nor tails of it. Maybe he ought to commission Isaac to make a similar painting and try to sell it to recoup the damages he had incurred. It looked like something well within his seven-year-old’s range, anyway.

James got to his feet, grabbing a tacky ceramic something- was it a goat wearing a backpack?- as he made his way to his son’s room. He knocked gently and entered to see Isaac sprawled facedown on top of the comforter. He didn’t move until James sat on the edge of the bed, his weight pulling Isaac toward him. “I know it was an accident, Isaac. I’m not mad at you.”

“Yes you are!” James could hear the tears in his son’s muffled voice.

“I’m upset with the situation, not you. But hey, look at this.” He held up the goat, and couldn’t help but smile, in spite of himself. It looked so stupid that it was almost cute.

Isaac sat up and slid to the edge of the bed beside his father, cheeks still wet with tears. “It’s broken. I broke it, like everything else!” A sob choked his words.

“Who says goats need four legs? I bet this guy can still hop around with three legs.”

Isaac managed a laugh. “I’m sorry, Dad.”

“Mom’s always saying we need to decorate the apartment. And now we bought her a painting and ceramics!” Isaac gave his dad a watery smile. “And hey, maybe we made some artist’s day. I mean, who else would have bought that ugly old painting?”

Isaac shrugged and took his father's implicit invitation to play, grabbing the goat and sitting down on the carpet. “Can you bring the other ones in, too, Dad? I wanna play with the hobo snail, too. Maybe we can glue his head back on.”

As James picked up the pile of broken critters in the living room, his gaze was drawn again to the painting that would force him to work doubles for the next few weeks. It was the ugliest thing he had ever seen. And yet, something about it, the swirling colors, the drips of paint that looked almost accidental, somehow it all came together into this tender moment with his destructive son. It looked like fleeting time and his fear of how quickly Isaac was growing, how the world was turning around him with dizzying speed, reminding him to drink in every last second with his family. He shook his head to clear it. No, it was definitely ugly.