What Art Looks Like

Art studio dismissed three hours ago, but when I pass the classroom, Silas is still there, banging his proverbial head against the proverbial wall. He sits as still as a mannequin on the three-legged stool in the corner, exactly as we all left him. He still clutches a paintbrush and an empty palette, as though he had every intention of painting but accidentally got himself frozen in time. 

I drop my bookbag by the door and make my way over to him, my flats pattering over the paint splatters on the floor, which look like leaves fallen from the easel-trees. Of course, the drips aren’t shaped like leaves- but that’s the essence of art. You take the familiar and morph it until it’s strange. “You make the apples gold to make people remember they’re green.” Someone important said something to that effect. 

I arrive at Silas’s little clearing and hop onto the stool closest to him- which is still a good five feet away. He blinks, removes the earbuds that were nestled in his large ears, and looks up at me for the first time, emerging from a reverie. “Hey, Ellen.”

I smile in greeting, but I can’t help but glance over to the canvas in front of him. My suspicions are confirmed: it’s completely blank. “No luck?” I ask. 

He grimaces, massaging his temples. “No inspiration.”

“You can’t always wait on inspiration,” I remind him, mimicking Professor Layton’s favorite words. “Sometimes you just have to paint something.”

Silas rubs his eyes, which are bloodshot with fatigue, and yawns. 

“You’re tired,” I observe. “Paint tiredness.”

“I can’t paint tiredness,” Silas grumbles, standing up and stretching. “I think I need a break.”

“You need food,” I say, standing and going back to my backpack to grab my leftover gas station french fries. I eat at gas stations whenever I can. The campus food turns my thoughts split-pea-soup green and makes my stomach bubble black ink. I know Silas doesn’t like it any more than I do, so I often save him something when he stays late at the studio. “Here,” I say, handing him the box of fries. 

“Thanks.” He receives them glumly and produces an energy drink from his backpack to go with his meal. “Did you finish your painting?” he asks, leaning back against the wall next to the window. 

“Almost,” I reply, climbing onto the windowsill next to him so I’m within fry-grabbing distance. 

“Can I see?” 

I bang my head backward onto the window in mock exasperation. “I just got comfortable.” But I get down and fetch my canvas to show him. 

“Hm,” he mutters, stroking the sparse shoots of the beard he’s been trying so hard to grow. “What’s it of?”

I look down at the canvas- a hodgepodge of pinks, greens, and yellows, evocative of springtime, joy, and breaths of fresh air. “I’m not entirely sure- but I think it’s some kind of meadow.”

“You think?” he asks. 

“I haven’t decided on a title yet,” I admit, propping the canvas against the wall and returning to my windowsill. 

Silas sips his energy drink and wipes his mouth on the back of his hand. “What would we ever do without titles?” he muses. There’s a sarcastic edge to his voice, and I can sense his frustration building like blocks in Tetris, mounting closer and closer to game over. “No one would have the vaguest idea what anything is supposed to be. All we paint is blobs and squiggles.”

“No,” I remind him, “those ‘blobs and squiggles’ are visual representations of invisible realities.”

“I’m just saying, why can’t we paint the visible ones?”

I chomp a fry, beheading it with my teeth. “Silas, I don’t know about you, but I’m here to learn how to create, not just replicate.”

It was the wrong thing to say. Now his waves of red annoyance are directed not at art in general, but at me. I can’t stand when he’s mad at me, but I also can’t stand when he’s mad about something that’s his own fault. I’m not responsible for the fact that he can’t figure out what colors go with the concept of ephemerality, or bliss, or despair. I’m not responsible for his strange desire to only paint the familiar. 

“That’s a meadow, right?” he said, pointing at my painting like a child saying his sibling started the fight. “Where are the flowers? Where is the grass? Where is the sky?”

I drop from the windowsill and rush to the defense of my art. “I didn’t need to include all that! People know what flowers look like! This painting is about the emotions you feel when standing in a meadow.” I hold it up, practically in his face. “It’s about the air you feel and the scents you smell.”

“All I smell is gobs of paint,” Silas retorts. 

I’m insulted, but rather than let him know I’m hurt, I turn the conversation back on him. “Oh, and your artwork is so much better. What was the second painting you did this year? A cat in tall grass?”

“The prompt was hunting! Cats are hunters!” he protests. 

“Yes, but everyone already knows what a cat looks like!” I say, throwing my palms face-up. 

“Well, maybe they need to be reminded sometimes!”

This conversation is getting nowhere. I grab a handful of fries, leaving only a couple in the box, and return to the window. The tension in the art studio threatens to blow the glass out and scatter it among the leaves drifting through the autumn air. Not really hungry anymore, I let a fry dangle from my lips, cradling it between my fingers like a cigarette. 

A flash to my left nearly blinds me, and I wheel around to see Silas holding his phone. 

“Did you just take a picture of me?”

“You looked funny.”

Ordinarily this kind of thing would make me laugh, but I’m so done with him right now I can’t even put a thought together. I abandon the rest of the fries on the windowsill for Silas to deal with and leave him alone to have some quality time with his blank canvas. 

Before I’m even back to my dorm room, I feel bad for how I acted, but the temperature is plummeting and I don’t want to walk back to the studio, so I vow to apologize first thing tomorrow morning. 

Our next studio class isn’t for another week, but I still have classes in the same building, so I arrive twenty minutes early, armed with a hot caramel macchiato for him and an iced mocha for me. 

I find him in the studio in the same position he was last night, but surrounded by a lot more mess. Three empty energy drink cans litter the floor, my fries are still scattered on the windowsill, and a couple of snack wrappers occupy the top of the trash bin. Silas himself is covered in paint- a good sign. His jeans are smeared with black, and there’s a navy blue streak on his forehead where he must have brushed his hair back. 

I walk over cautiously and hand him the macchiato. “Sorry.” 

“About?” His voice is still moody, but he takes a sip of the coffee. 

“Last night.”

“You’re fine.”

I gesture to the canvas, which is positioned between him and me with its paint-holding side facing him. “Got something?”

He raises his eyebrows. “An idea, at least.”

“Can I see?”

“It’ll be done by studio time on Monday.”

Every time I pass the studio for the rest of the week, Silas is there, working on his mysterious little project. He keeps the canvas turned towards the corner, hidden from the eyes of passersby like myself. By the time studio class rolls around, I’m practically aching to see the end result. 

I’m the first to arrive. Silas has a class right before art studio, so he’s never the first one here, despite being here at nearly any other time. That canvas in the corner calls to me, drawing my eyes, whispering my name, calling me over for an illicit look.

I pad through the easel-woods like a deer wary of a hunter, walking towards that corner as if in a trance. 

“You don’t have to act all sneaky.”

I whirl around to see my hunter has arrived. Silas stands in the doorway, then casually drops his backpack next to mine.

“Leave class early?” I ask. 

“Got cancelled,” he says, coming to join me. He walks with me the few short steps to his corner, and for the first time I lay eyes on his project. “What do you think?”

It’s a profile of a girl with straight black hair that blends into her shadowy surroundings. She’s looking out a window into a dark autumn sky which she views from behind thin-framed glasses. With two fingers she holds a french fry to her lips like a cigarette. 

“I hate you.”

But the painting is so bad I can’t help but laugh. It’s a perfect replica of me, not an ounce of creativity or originality. My eyes stare aimlessly, the french fry looks like a cheap gas station french fry, and the sky is a perfectly average hue of blackish-blue. He’s put nothing interpretive into it. True to his own style, he’s simply replicated that stupid picture he took. Replicated it flawlessly. 

Other students begin to filter in, and eventually Professor Layton arrives. She’s a tiny woman, just under five feet even in heels, but still manages to give the impression of looking down upon all her students- especially Silas. Seeing the pair of us looking at his painting, she comes over to take a look. 

She stares for a long time, eyebrows knitting together, expression impossible to read. Students begin to trickle in and take their places at their own easels, stealing glances at Silas’s corner when they think no one’s looking. 

Finally, Professor Layton says, “See me after class.” 

At the end of studio class, Silas waits in his corner like a trapped fox. I linger, staring at my own canvas. It seems incomplete somehow, but I can’t figure out what’s wrong with it. 

Suddenly Layton materializes next to me. “Could you give us five minutes, Ellen?”

“Of course,” I say with much more graciousness than I feel. Despite my satisfaction that Silas will get what’s coming to him for his lack of innovation, my stomach is roiling with that black acid I usually associate with dining hall subs. I go out into the hallway to wait, and Layton closes the door. 

I pace the hall, admiring the artwork there. It’s all unique and lovely- swirling colors depicting great and mysterious emotion. Some are amorphous, some geometric, some merely a blur while others appear like patchwork. The swirls of color seem to emote my own apprehension as I wait for the door to open again. 

When it finally does, it’s with the disappointment of someone simply popping a balloon instead of letting it fly. Layton marches out, Silas’s canvas tucked under her arm, smiles at me, and disappears into her office two doors down. 

I wait until her office door is shut, then join Silas once again in the classroom. 

“You’re still here,” he says. He’s sitting in his corner again, but now the easel in front of him is empty, a tree that’s lost its leaves. 

“Yeah. Looks like I’m the one staying late to finish this time,” I say, laughing a little. “What did Layton want?”

Silas swallows, his voice box bobbing up and down like a ship on troubled waters. “I failed the assignment.”

I want to ask if he’s surprised, but he looks pretty upset and I don’t want to have to buy him another make-up coffee. 

“They won’t even display the painting,” he continues, not meeting my eyes.

“Did she say why?”

“She called it ‘a product of a bygone age’ and confiscated it. Said it goes against the institution’s commitment to progress. Said only five-year-olds paint people.” He smiles, but it’s not a real smile- more like the face you make when someone gives you something disgusting to eat and you have to pretend to like it. “Guess you were right. Maybe it’s not really art.”

You were right. I let those precious, juicy words echo in my ears for a moment before I ask, “What’s she going to do with it?”

Silas shrugs. “Trash it. Burn it. Give it to her ex. I don’t know.”

I sit down at my easel, wiping my hands on my jeans. They’d gotten sweaty while I waited in the hall. “If you’re really attached to it, you could ask for it back,” I point out. 

Silas shakes his head, biting his lower lip. “There’s no point. I’m dropping the class.”

“Why?” I ask, though I don’t think it’s a bad idea. He’ll fail at this point if he doesn’t withdraw. 

“I can’t learn how to paint from people that don’t define art the same way I do.”

“Silas, the whole world defines art differently than you do,” I remind him. Then, thinking I’ve been a little brash, I add more gently, “Maybe art’s not the path for you, and that’s okay.” My eyes travel to the brown leaves floating past the window. “Or maybe it’s just not the right season for it.”

“Hm,” Silas grunts. “The right season.” He follows my eyes to the window. “You know what comes after fall?” Without waiting for me to answer, he gives the obvious answer. “Winter. And you know what happens in winter? Everything freezes up and dies.” He rises from his stool, folds up his easel, and props it against the wall, then crosses the room and hoists his bookbag off the floor to sling it over his shoulder. “This school is freezing and dying, Ellen. Art is freezing and dying. I can’t be one of its killers.”

And then he’s gone.

The corner seems empty without Silas lingering there after class, so I set his easel back up and move my painting there. It’s too quiet, so I turn on some music- an innovative atonal work perfect for abstract thinking. And then I stare at my painting. 

Smears of yellow.

Glops of green. 

Streaks of pink. 

The right season, I’d told Silas. Seasons are a powerfully evocative construct. Silas is convinced art is in its winter. I’ll prove him wrong. My painting will be called Springtime- a title that’s specific, yet open to interpretation. This painting will speak of life, of exuberance, of new birth. 

So why does it still feel incomplete?

I then pick up my smallest brush and do a very foolish, very Silas thing- I add a tiny white flower- a daisy, I think- at the bottom right of the canvas. Then I step back to see how it looks. 

I’m pleasantly surprised; it’s cute. Pretty, even. But the lines are too sharp. It stands in stark contrast against the psychic blur. I pick up a larger brush, and with one stroke I reduce the daisy to a white smear- the impression of a flower rather than the imitation of one. 

After all, people know what spring looks like.