Painting Devastation
Zeta sat cross-legged in her studio, taking in the enormous blank canvass before her. She closed her eyes and drew her attention inward. She was aware of the sensations on her body: the chill on her skin, the gentle pressure of the plush cushions supporting her from underneath, a tickle in her nose.
Once she felt situated, she drew her attention to her mind and the emotions that arose. She allowed her attention to drift on the surging waves of contrasting emotions. After surveying the turbid scape of her mind, she allowed herself to land on one. A big one loomed, recognizable. She had been suspended in it for days: emptiness.
“It’s what she felt in her soul. Emptiness. Like the vacuum that surrounded the star base. ”
She stood, picked up her largest brush, and began to prime the canvass in a ultramarine blue-Mars black mixture with long, deliberate, horizontal strokes, not bothering to soften the edges.
This was how she felt in the days that passed since Jaeger had unceremoniously removed and handed her collar to conclude their arrangement.
She sat back on her heels to consider the vacuous space on the five-by-eight foot canvass. As she reflected on the blackness, she recognized it’s complexity. It wasn’t a true emptiness. There was a sadness that washed over, or maybe flickered in and out. What was it? She grasped for it, as if struggling for a word. Before frustration set in, she abandoned the effort and called it what it was, a sad, muted blue.
She avoided wasting mental energy on the why of it, the suddenness of it. One moment they seemed to be exploring more than an arrangement. They met for dinner and talked, foregoing instruction for intimacy.
“The sharp sting that came with rejection. The deep dark blue that came with feeling unwanted. Over the black, she painted broad strokes of phthalo blue in its deepest, purest form. ”
She was grateful they’d never met in her quarters. The cold austere, albeit elegant, atmosphere of his living space had suited what she came to realize had been a cold austere arrangement. As a submissive, she had been uniquely positioned to train him in the art of Dominance. He had been a tyrant seeking refinement. She provided that.
She never invited him into her space. It wasn’t calculated. She followed his lead. Now she was grateful that she hadn’t revealed so much of herself to him. She imagined him an iceberg never becoming familiar with the warmth of her rooms. The chaos of her work space, the softness of her plush living quarters.
She relished a flash of spite that she didn’t exposed that part of herself. That he hadn’t enjoyed the cosseting warmth of sumptuous furnishings and warm colors.
“As an empath, she was susceptible to the emotions of those nearby. Cocooning herself in plush, warm surroundings insulated her from the bombardment of the emotions of others. ”
She folded cadmium red into the blue, creating an almost violet. With the large brush, she overlaid the black with the violet.
She set her pallet of blues aside and sat back in her submissive pose. Palms up, considering the emptiness of space folded over with a sadness of rejection and reflected on the emotions arising. She reached into the swirling torment that arose in her mind and pulled out another emotion.
Raw. In her mind she gave it a color, and as she considered the canvas, she gave it a shape and found it a place.
She began painting diagonal slashes of a deep and bloody red. The red of torn flesh. Long, deep, careless strokes. Stab wounds on the canvass. She felt raw and exposed.
She was his teacher, allowing him to render his lessons on her body. She had thought him a rough blob of clay to be molded. In the end, he had needed little refinement. Her heart had succumbed to his being as her body had to his touch.
She sat back on her heels and took in the landscape of her bloody and exposed heart bared on the canvass before her. She reached into the chaotic swirl of emotions and pulled out the steel gray blue of a calm ocean under an ominous sky.
Zeta had seen the ocean when she went to study at university on Earth. It was the ocean that introduced her to shades of gray and green and blue that she didn’t know existed beyond pixelated renderings. It was the ocean that gave breath to her art. Before she went to Earth, her work had been wrought in charcoal. The colors on Earth, called the art up from her blood and showed her what it meant to be an artist.
Next she layered the canvass in a chaos of blues and grays.
First a mixture of deep green-blue-grey, the color of Earth’s ocean during a storm to capture the sense of being adrift, unmoored in the open ocean.
A melancholy blue that hinted at the moments when she would follow the sinking ache of her stomach down to nowhere. Just the heavy weight of a dull middle blue.
A light grey captured her disconnectedness, or the haze she had moved in since the day she had been cut lose with a spitefully casual dismissal.
“It was due to her mastery of color that her renderings decorated walls on private quarters and public spaces throughout the space station. Her empathetic interpretation of life drew viewers in. Her work was well known on the station. Painting was thought to be an ancient art, especially on the star base, and its inhabitants considered her a master. ”
The red she plucked from emotions that flowered through her mind was no longer the red of open wounds, but of rage. She felt the anger at herself for allowing herself to be swept up so blindly.
Zeta had left enough of the red strokes visible to allow the emotion to persist. She touched them up with pinks and white to give them the abstract appearance of slashed flesh in the canvass. She left the gashes exposed, but allowed them to fall to the background. A failed attempt to hide her vulnerability. She didn’t want to erase that anger, but recognize its existence, preserve its memory. The reds were no longer the open gashes of her pain, but of rage.
Still feeling the clamp bearing down on her heart, she painted a stormy gray pulsing around the perimeter of the most predominant reds, adding layers with deep wine reds that fed the anger. That was the constricting of her heart. Its stiffening under crusting clots.
With a fine wire, she dragged a light gray through a section of the work to paint cracks. Tiny, fine, jagged little cracks. She used a wire with a make-shift handle to etch the cracks onto the layers. These were the fine cracks that threatened to shatter the thin-skinned cocoon that kept her held together.
She took a deep dark green and applied flecks. This was her strength. They were small right now, but they were there. Tiny flecks that would grow. The anger fed her strength, and she felt it present. She’d be fine.
When a wave of neediness passed through her, she grasped for her anger and clutched a palette knife. She carved jagged lines resembling lightning bolts in dusky blues and a stark white.
Another blue washed over her. So much blue. Smokey midnight blue. Anger at the callous dismissal in his gun metal gray eyes were captured as dirty snow caps carved by another knife.
She mixed the colors to capture the cold gray of his eyes. Meh. This was about her, not him or his eyes. She painted over that with a blue-black to match the background. A void to erase him.
She captured each rising emotion as she identified it’s color. She reached into the torment of a storm, pulled out an emotion, and gave it a shape, a color, and a place. She transferred it from her to the canvass. Each emotion lived in its own realization. She compartmentalized each one.
“Zeta attacked the canvas this way for hours. ”
Once her anger on the canvass was dispelled, she sat back on her heels again. She felt hope. She grabbed some yellow. She knew that once this heart-cramping ache passed, she would come out on the other side. She added small tufts of yellow with light brush strokes. Not too much. She didn’t want to diminish the magnitude of the pain. Just a glimmer of hope on the edge, a hint of possible futures at the periphery.
She worked this way, honoring and capturing each emotion as it arose.
Finally, she drew a fine line in green across the expanse, barely visible at some points on its trajectory, prominent in others. This green line was her capacity for love. A continuous unbroken line that would be her strength regardless of the wreckage through which it traversed.
Zeta examined the work, a chaos of color, texture and depth, a cathartic expulsion of anger and hurt. She called it Devastation.
When she finished, depleted, she washed the wet paint off her hands. The dried paint, she’d wash off later. She stripped her color streaked and sweat dampened clothes off and crawled into her bed in the partitioned-off bedroom behind the work studio.
She had worked to purge her emotions for nine hours, stopping only for water and tea. Her stomach growled. She was exhausted from the relentless outpouring of emotion. She would experience waves of anguish again, she knew. Yet the amplitude of waves would diminish over time. She burrowed into the nest of soft feathery covers.
Tomorrow, Jules would make her eat, do yoga, collect eggs, and play with Wren in the courtyard she and her husband had created by annexing the adjacent quarters. There would be food and life and love. Now she slept.
******
Zeta sat cross-legged on the cushions and considered the small canvass before her. She took in the sensations on her body. The pressure of cushions beneath her. After adjusting the climate control settings the previous night, she felt the warmth of the space envelop her. She closed her eyes and drew her attention inward. Down to her center, her core, and imagined the tiny life force growing inside her. She drew her attention to her mind and the emotions that arose. She felt love, and peace, and hope.
She picked up a medium sized brush and began to prime the small canvass with a soft yellow. An auspicious color.