Blank Canvas
Photo Credit: Trina Baker (Flickr.com)
The canvas was blank.
The artist stared at his hand.
It wasn’t that he was looking for inspiration – after all, he knew exactly what it was that he wanted to paint. The problem wasn’t in the idea.
It was in finding the right place to start.
His eyes followed the lines on the inside of his palm. It was like looking at a river on a map – he could trace each line, and see it branch out into tributaries, streams and creeks. He could see the delta up near his index finger, and the stronger, deeper, more powerful line it formed. He wondered which way the water would flow on his hand – towards his thumb, or towards the outer edge of his palm.
He thought about spitting on his hand, just to see how the liquid would flow, but no—that would defeat the purpose of the exercise. He wasn’t supposed to be thinking; just staring.
He turned his vision to a small piece of calloused skin that had turned white and flaky. Underneath it, his hand was smooth, free of the wrinkles and creases he could see elsewhere. The hard skin on the top wore its ridges much more deeply than the skin around it. It was as if the top layer removed all signs of age as it came off his skin; the bottom layer was fresh and new, wrinkle-free and able to be molded into something new. He wondered if the texture of the paintbrush would start to shape it. Perhaps his hand would take on the smooth polish of the wood. Perhaps it would even start to feel smooth, like the wood, and give the brush a point on his hand on which he might lose control. That would be unfortunate. He could see himself now, painting and slipping just a bit. A slip of the brush could cost him hours of work if it was too severe.
He sighed and turned his hand over. The purpose of this exercise was to put the mind in a creative place, not to stifle his creative energy with thoughts of failure. The back of his hand – now that was an interesting place, far more worthy of creative consideration. He flexed his fingers, watching the muscles of his knuckle push up the mountainous bones that controlled his fingers, along with the skeletal structures under the skin that seemed to pop up. His gaze went deeper into the flesh, admiring the individual craters that made up the surface of the skin. Some of them had fine blond hairs sticking out, but most didn’t seem to have any hair at all. He wondered if the craters were supposed to be hair follicles, or if they were just tiny dimples in the skin.
He’d heard, once, that the reason human fingers were so dexterous was because they had tiny, eye-like sensory organs in their tips. They weren’t eyes in the conventional sense, but more like sensors that could see with a sort of blind sight – aware of things, but not conscious of them.
He stretched his fingers up under his eyes and studied them carefully. The light overhead gleamed off their tips. One would think, if there were any eyes on the fingers, you would be able to see them wincing in that light. He turned his gaze slight away from his fingers, but watched them in his peripheral vision, waiting to see if he could detect some sort of motion – some sign of eyes opening and closing. He waited, watching, and thought, for a moment, that perhaps he’d seen something. But he realized it was more likely a trick of the light, or an error of his eye.
His eye flitted to the canvas in front of him, and suddenly, he knew exactly where to begin. The entire plan seemed to appear on the canvas in front of him, almost like a paint-by numbers picture stacked upon other layers.
He picked up his brush, and he began to paint.
Fiction, Writing Scraps | SeanJJordan | 
July 1, 2010 7:04 pm
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