Blue Strokes and Broken Shelves

“Why does my nose look crooked?  Is my nose that crooked in real life?  Or can I not paint?  Or both?  Do I have a crooked nose and I can’t paint?  I should just kill myself now.”  Flora looked at the painted canvas in front of her, moving her head side to side as though the nose would look better at a different angle.

“Relax.  It’s fine.  You need a break.  You have been at this all morning.” Ollie said.  He closed the newspaper in his lap, leaving a thumb on the article he was reading so he could return to it later.  

Flora and Ollie met in art school.  They were both the prodigies of the painting class and, therefore, obligated to converse with one another during their weekly critiques.  What grew was a friendship that lasted long past graduation and caused Ollie to appear in her studio at all hours uninvited. 

“The show at the Beterman exhibit is in two weeks.  They always have a self portrait.  Why can’t I paint this simple thing?” 

“Do you want me to paint something?  I did a self portrait of myself just the other day.  I could do yours too,” said Ollie.

“Wouldn’t that be cheating? Is this your way of getting me kicked out of the Beterman exhibit?” Flora pointed a blue oil paint slicked paintbrush at Ollie.

“No, I could never do that.  You fully deserve this. I’m happy for you.  One day it will be my turn, but right now it is yours.” 

“Ollie, you are a fantastic artist. I’m sure your time will come soon.” 

“Why don’t you do what Thimble did and make something abstract?”

“Thimble is an abstract artist.  I am not,” said Sarah. 

“Okay, just paint your hand or something.”

“Hands are literally the hardest thing to paint.  If I can’t paint my face, how could I ever paint my hand?” 

“I give up,” Ollie picked up his newspaper, smiled at Flora, bopping her on the head with it before Flora heard the click of the door.

Flora concentrated on the canvas.  She knew Ollie was right.  She didn’t have to paint her face.  She picked up her brush, dipped it in the blue she had mixed earlier, and made a single stroke at her nose.  

“This will never work.” 

Flora picked up the canvas on her easel with care and replaced it with a fresh white one she had made earlier that month in preparation of the Beterman exhibit. 

The Beterman exhibit was not any exhibit.  All artists knew the Beterman exhibit was the place where the most wealthy of the West Coast come and bid on artists who are up in coming hoping to find the next Monet.  That is where the elite discovered Thimble, and where they discovered Brenda Welsh, and most famously, where they found Ian Rider.  This was the break Flora had been looking for her entire career and it all was riding on this single portrait. 

Not that Flora was after the money that would surely come.  She inherited plenty of money when her grandfather passed away while she was in art school.  If she did not have the inheritance, she would have given up being a fine artist decades ago.  After graduation, when it became clear her California bungalow was too small to paint, she custom built a studio in the backyard.

What she craved was fame and notoriety that comes with being a well-known artist.  Five Hundred years from now, she wanted her paintings to be hung in a museum for the public to gawk at.  The Beterman exhibit could do this for her.

Flora raised her hand in front of her as though she was seeing it for the first time.  Why did it look so old?  It had various colors and the knuckles stuck out like the mountain peaks of the Himalayas.  She was only in her early forties, but it appeared her hand had aged to eighty. She could not paint this hand.  She didn’t know if she had a crooked nose, but she knew she had old hands.

Flora glanced down at her chihuahua mix, Elenor.  She could always paint Elenor as an extension of herself.  She had painted Elenor hundreds of times, and each was great.  In fact, she could skip the assignment all together and chose one from her collection that she had never shown before.  She had plenty of portraits of Elenor.

Flora stood and walked to the studio closet, tripping over the ottoman she always tripped over.  Ollie always left it in the middle of the studio when he came to visit to rest his feet and never put it back against the chair.   

She opened the closet door and peered in.  Her studio was custom-built to be small, with a closet nearly twice the size of the studio itself with no windows, temperature controlled, and sliding shelves made specifically to store her canvases. She slid a hefty shelf aside.  She always intended to sort the closet, but never found the energy to do so.  She slid the next shelf gazing at the artwork stored there, but she didn’t see any of Elenor.  

The next shelf she pulled, but it seemed to stick. She tugged at it a little harder, as though she was in the tug-of-war match with the sliding rails.  It gave way and she stepped back, losing her balance.  The shelf had come loose from the rails and came crashing down on Flora’s head.

Flora laid on the ground of the closet, her head smashed between the upright shelf and the shelf that came crashing down.  Her paintbrush was still in her hand and red pool around it and into the bristles caked with blue paint.

“That should do it,” said Ollie.  Coming from behind the broken shelf.  Ollie had never left the studio, where Flora thought the door had closed, it was the closet door where Ollie had snuck in that she heard.  He didn’t expect her to enter the closet so soon and had finished unscrewing the bolt seconds before Flora had entered.  But now that Flora is incapacitated, Ollie was sure to be invited to show at the Beterman exhibit.”