An Artist's Dilemma

Catherine was an artist; from the moment her fingers could cradle a brush she splashed citrus orange onto golden skies, royal blue onto cerulean seas, and burnt umber onto snowy plains, animating lamented white canvases with her vibrant colors and studying them with vivacious eyes. Her imaginative yet unconventional demeanor meant that her younger years were spent indoors, much to her mother’s chagrin. “Catherine,” her mother would say, “Why don’t you go and play outside with the neighbor kids? You’re looking a little pale.” In response, Catherine would clutch her plastic easel and paint on the porch in the backyard. The problem was that Catherine simply did not see the appeal of raucous play and scratchy grass when she could bring to life landscapes beyond her front lawn, even beyond her almost annoyingly agreeable little suburb. Because, standing back with her hands on her hips and an irrefutable scowl gracing her cherub-like features, she realized that all of her canvases were chalk-full of grassy green hills, the badly sketched hazel eyes of her elementary school friends, and the badge on her dad’s uniform.

When she grew up, she stayed a simple young woman, more reserved than most, preferring to tell her story with stunning hues through daft fingers, as opposed to her mouth and unreliable words. To her mother, she was still the same little girl who cried when she realized she was the only one among her flawless friend group who had freckles, but Catherine knew she was a young woman now. And what did young women do?

“They go to college, and get a proper education,” her mother had said, pushing the golden tassel of her graduation cap behind her ear as her father watched with tears in his eyes. Catherine rolled her eyes, picking at the lobe of her ear, a nervous habit she had picked up while in private school and hadn’t managed to kick. So, even though she had insisted she was perfectly capable of making ends meet by selling her art online and at second-rate galleries, she went to college and received a proper education. It didn’t seem much help now though, she thought, sitting in her one bedroom studio apartment, a graduation gift from her father, with her brush pressed unmoving against the canvas, crimson watercolor dripping down like a stream until it landed on beige wood floors. Perhaps she was just a bit pessimistic, she mused, resigning herself silently and rinsing her brushes with the same care a mother might bathe her child. At least she had chosen an admirably virtuosic profession. Art, she thought, smoothing down her tunic and fixing her bun, transcends any spoken language. For words spoken were simply air, and although people needed air to live, they certainly did not cherish it. People cherished art, which was why she considered herself lucky that she chose to be a patron of such an art adored. 

But now, as a young woman of twenty four, scrolling mindlessly through social media and seeing nothing but jet black boring into her, she wondered if words really were of such little consequence. Actions, it would seem, started a rebellion, but words; words started a revolution. And no one was focused on representation. No one cared for strokes of green and splashes of pink and tints of blue.

All she saw within the black were splatters of red.

As a woman of little words, she stayed quiet as the demands to do something for heinous crimes grew louder.

She had an opinion on the matter, of course. She had tried to discuss it with one of her friends over brunch the past Tuesday, but she was taken aback when she was swiftly hushed, the brown orbs of her friend flitting around the room like a nervous hummingbird. Her friend placed her coffee down gingerly and laid her hand on Catherine’s, and Catherine felt a twinge of something she couldn’t quite place but found was most similar to pain before her friend withdrew and returned to the topic of her meeting her boyfriend’s mother. She smiled to lighten the mood, and nothing else was said on the matter, but Catherine had suddenly lost her normally extensive appetite.

She had been caught in one of the middle of these protests, before. She was grocery shopping when she was almost trampled by people with armfuls of jugs of milk, and Catherine, dusting a footprint off of her favorite jacket and watching them retreat past the registers, found herself not angry, but curious. Not curious, but intrigued. When she had mentioned it to her parents, they simply clutched her against them as if she was four years old with a scraped knee again and murmured comfortingly to her. Told her to stay away from “those people.” But the fact was that it wasn’t the profanities, or the screams, or even the tear gas that made her eyes water and her skin itch. Sitting on a bench, her coat pulled tight around her as feet marched by with terrifying purpose, she looked down to find her sketchbook blank. She found herself unable to capture knitted brows, milky yellow smoke, the vanishing city luster. And coupling with the protestors was out of the question; her mother would kill her if she found out somehow.

But she knew that she had to capture this injustice on paper. Words were fleeting, suspended in midair as thick as gas, but it disappeared eventually.

(She was too naive to realize that the memory never did.)

So she set about putting in on a canvas. She watched the riots from her fourth story window, the advancing of both parties as if it were war. She painted uniforms on both sides, crimson and royal blue, and then burned the canvas in her fireplace. She drew them as circles and squares, abstract, and again the canvas ended in gray, chalky ash. It went on like that, for two weeks. Some nights she considered joining them, but the same question always nagged her. What would my mother think?

And when she finally discovered the perfect combination, of navy ink and reddened streets and authentic terror, she sat back and realized she had painted her father on one side. Stoic as always, as he had always been growing up, but his soft expression hardened and basked in ivory smoke and the shadows of fighters.

The question again rang true in her head, and she casted the painting into the fireplace. She set about rinsing her brushes with the same care a mother might bathe her child. But this time, she realized, there was a mother out there without her child, and she was too afraid to do anything about it.