The dry erase marker sketch of a prostrate figure of a nude woman covered the automatic glass door of the student union building. She held her half-lotus knees as though in ecstatic pain, a red cellophane circle emanating from between her legs. This represented the first and only piece of art at the freshman show that honestly moved Roselyn. It made her think of the power of the feminine, of motherhood. Yeah, it was marker, but that made the beauty of it all the more fleeting, like a sand painting. It also, unfortunately, meant that it was going to be erased by the janitor in a few hours.
When she found the artist, a self-effacing Jewish girl named Annalissa looking nervous behind a bushel of curling brown hair, and complimented this work, Roselyn told it was nothing important.
"I'm out of my circle period. Have you seen my soft sculptures?" Roselyn looked back to the ten-foot long plush guitar hanging on the wall. It seemed to be made of bed sheets discarded for good reason.
"No," she lied. "They're nice. Did you look at my pictures?"
Annalissa reacted as most everyone had tonight. An intake of breath -- almost the preamble to a yawn, more a gasp -- then the look of searching. It could not be that they found her work wanting or they would have called it "nice." Nor did it seem they particularly liked it or her fellow art students would ignore her and the pictures, intimidated. What did that leave?
Most in the grips of playing a frustratingly piecemeal role in another person's adventure would have forgotten about classes and coursework, but not Roselyn. Any moment not exhausted worrying about Shane's welfare, any free night not spent in the forgiving surrender of Dryden's arms and bed, became devoted to her art. She breathed pencil shavings, ate erasers and drank paint, none as figuratively as was healthy. As a result, her work bloomed. While her classmates struggled and fought to prepare for the freshman art show, Roselyn had an abundance of work to display.
Annalissa moved closer to a series of randomly overlapping circles in utterly mixed media, spackle and foil and paint, ignoring Roselyn's question. "What do you think of my circles?"
Roselyn run her finger over the circles, tracing the looping circumference. Roselyn thought they were art for art's sake. Which wasn't always a bad thing. Christo and Jeanne-Claude, who wrapped the Reichstag and the Pont Neuf, did art for art's sake and the world took note. Instead, Roselyn mumbled some critique loaded with memorized jargon and excused herself for another class of gratis wine.
She passed the rest of Annalissa's pictures, mostly involving orbs entering people at various point and composed a narrative. Naked Annalissa looked sad because she gave birth to the magic space egg, which will hatch and spawn a new race of burqa monks, which will sex her up to create more space eggs. The circle was complete. It wasn't Annalissa's intent but it made Roselyn smirk.
Grabbing a handful of grapes and a plastic cup of wine from the table used to entice the students to come to the freshmen shows; she focused on a more important circle, the ring of people staring mutely at her pictures of daemons. She found their solemnity more dizzying that the cheap wine she downed to keep calm and instead casually studied the pert, bare breasts on the familiar model of a series of black and white photographs -- would her own breasts look so sexy if they were smaller? -- before realizing their artist and subject studied Roselyn's own chest with as much appreciative focus. "I was just... good composition."
"Yours are really great too," the small, shorthaired artist replied.
rate
email
print
link to this page
