We-Write # 15: Art Class - Defending the dark muse

Hi everybody,

Taken by @zeleiracordero beginning and wrote my own continuation. That's probably not right according to the rules of the contest by @zeldacroft and @freewritehouse, but oh well. So I won't win. )))

By @zeleiracordero

Liam knew he couldn't use that color palette at the scene of a dream crime, but nothing worked for him that day, it was as if he was looking at life from inside a mirror, all inverted, even the murder he dreamed of.

There was no greater desire in the world than his desire to succeed as a painter. He spent whole days researching on nightmares, practicing the degradation of color for represent them, for that was what was disturbing him at this time. It seemed easy, but it was not, in art everything and nothing is easy.

"Nightmares look like dreams and seem reality, a mixture of images and sensations in a chaotic environment by the fear that reigns." He said to himself, concentrated on his task, absorbed in himself, oblivious to the explanations of the professor who, for a time, had been explaining.

"Liam, pay attention, listen and then apply."

"Excuse me, Master... Was he talking to me?"

"Didn't you hear anything I said?"

"No"...

"How will you learn painting techniques if you don't pay attention to me?"

"If I pay attention to him, it's just that I kept his last suggestion on how to yell at the canvas, when what we want is for them to hear us with every brushstroke."

"But how are you going to transfer emotions to the canvas, if you yourself don't get excited about what you're doing?"

Liam looked at his master with a lost look, that way of focusing the eyes without bringing any light of understanding to the other.

"I have recorded a look that is not of this world. A woman looks at me with serene look that cries out for help. That has motivated and frightened me... because, what emotion, apart from fear, will scream from the canvas"

"Did you catch a dark muse or did she hang you from her hook?"

"What are you talking about?"

"Did you dream the image you're trying to revive on the canvas or is it the fruit of your imagination?"

"I dreamt it, but more than a dream, it seems like a nightmare because I move in an atmosphere of fear. I see a beautiful woman who seems to have been murdered, looks alive and looks dead. She lies on a surface that I can't distinguish well. I feel that she is asking for help but I don't know what to do, I want to leave the dream but that doesn't let me out so I have to fight to get back, I feel that she came with me, but it doesn't have a definitive form, I only remember a fixed look and a lot of blood running like a dark vine."

"Do you feel afraid always or only in your own dream?"

"In the dream, but I'm obsessed with her. How do I paint something that I fear and that fear does not belong to this plane but to another reality. How do I begin the sketch of something that I have never really seen, but that comes out in a dark dream that scares because of the uncertainty that surrounds it, but that attracts because one feels part of the history that is woven in that underworld where only a beautifully twisted vision is shown by my mind"

"That's what they call since antiquity, a dark muse."

*** my continuation ***

Obsessed by the nightmare that haunted him during the day, piercing vail of consciousness, Liam was afraid to fall asleep, when the dark muse would get complete control over his existence. The constant struggle with himself and the sleep deprivation made Liam irritable, unable to concentrate and listen to the professor’s explanation during the lecture. He felt that something daunting was about to happen, yet the strength of his spirit was undermined. Having come to his dorm, he fell on his bed and, almost instantly, the part of his consciousness that perceived the reality was subdued.

Somewhere on the remote periphery of his cognition, Liam understood that he was now inside the nightmare, but this was all the processing power that he could devote to this awareness.

Now the horror of the scene dawned on him in all its awesome horrific clarity. Yet, being completely incapacitated from physical movement by bone frizzing fear, Liam sensed the new strange ability he acquired within the nightmare. If during the day, Liam has seen the woman alive and dead at the same time, it was as if the time of the entire murder collapsed into a point, now this time expanded and he could observe the entire murder as if he could see it in a movie.

The surface where the woman laid dead, and, during the day, appeared indistinguishable, now became very clear and turned out to be the floor in his art class, where he and the other students draw models. More importantly, now he recognized the woman model. It was a model of exceptional beauty and perfect classical proportions who came to the art studio several times and then disappeared. Liam remembered how enamored he was with her beauty, both as a man and as an artist. He also remembered that he got into an argument with the professor over how this beauty should be depicted on the canvas. The professor referred to old tested methods, developed by the genius painters of the past, discussed and compared advantages and disadvantages of Italian, Dutch and Spanish schools of depicting the nude bodies. Liam, however, felt that this approach stifled creativity in general and his creativity in particular because each of the painters of the past discovered didn’t just follow the previous painters, but discovered their own way in art.
He remembered how he screamed at his professor “You have to let your muse fly! What you are doing is pinning her down, draining her blood and powdering her with naphthalene as if it’s a collection moth!”

Then security guards ran in and held Liam down until police officers arrived, and put handcuffs on him. He even remembered how his professor stood up for him

“Liam is not a violent offender,” he explained to the arrived police officer and the ambulance doctor, “but a very talented student and impressionable person. For now, just give him a sedative and put him in bed.” The scene flickered through Liam’s mind in its detailed completeness a fraction of a second. Still, this was only a side memory. The terrible scene of a murder occupied the main part of his emotional being.

In his mind’s eye Liam saw how after he was taken away from the class, the actual murder took place. On the professor’s command, the students gang up on a poor woman, wrestled her down, and held her while the professor removed the scalpel from his inner pocket. It was the same scalpel, which the professor used to scrape the paint of the surface of a canvas. The girl screamed. Her beautiful eyes were full of horror. Quickly and with professional precision, the professor bent down to her, made a small incision on her neck through her carotid artery. At first, the blood sprayed all over the floor, and then was still dripping for a while, having formed a puddle of blood on the floor. Woman’s head was tilted to the side powerlessly and her eyes were still crying out for help.

“Now, bring me naphthalene!” the professor said with an even metallic voice, “we need to add her to our school collection of muses so that all future students know how to bridle the inspirations.”

These words and the concepts that were underlying these words were so hostile to Liam, that they filled him with righteous anger that overcame his fear. He willed himself to travel to the time before the session and before his argument with the professor and the subsequent murder.

Not knowing how Liam’s Glock 19 handgun appeared hi his hands. His dad bought it for Liam and told him to use it only for the purpose of self-defense. But Liam realized that to save the life of his muse, moreover, it was a real person, will no doubt be an equally noble cause. “If not you, then who?” he asked himself and his determination to save the beautiful women solidified.

Like an angel of justice, he stormed the art-studio right before the professor was about to insert his scalpel into the throat of the beautiful innocent victim and opened fire.

***

The next day all the nation’s newspapers wrote about another mass shooting.

“It’s about time to reconsider the second amendment! This time the shooting happened in a famous art school. The art professor and two students received mortal wounds. Four more students were taken to the local Mercy hospital and now are in critical condition. The shooter was identified as twenty-two-year-old art student Liam Newcastle. The defendant pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity and now is undergoing a psychological evaluation in establishing his true motives. Forensic psychologists run multiple tests including the TOMM test (the Test of Memory Malingering)…”