In Which Two Skillsets Never Quite Meet

One

Being in the domes sits heavy on my chest as I sprawl backwards on a drawing horse. I look around through a writer’s eyes, and force twitchy artist fingers to form letters rather than shapes. My handwriting looks strange on the page. This is not what paper is for. This is not what pens are for. Not in this place. It is a bizarrely difficult exercise, to sit in an artist’s studio, and write what I see. Here especially I have been trained not to see things at all, but instead only form, hue, saturation, value. I can feel my mind struggling to do anything else, it is sputtering like an engine that won’t turn over. There is an achy strain of two neuron pathways competing. Let’s see if I may force them to connect.

Two

The building itself is strange, but simple enough. There’s one column in the middle of a quasi-circular room. It’s partially encased by a thin plywood box. Rafters stretch to the ceiling from the center pole, giving the appearance of an opened umbrella. Just off of center, there is a small gray platform, where a model might stand for figure drawing. There are walls, maybe twenty or so, meeting at such acute angles and casting so few shadows that one might not even notice that they are distinct from one another. There are narrow windows on every-other wall, each set in a plain flat frame. The sills are about two inches deep, leaving enough of a ledge to set one’s coffee down, or to lean against in the pale hours of the morning as they step back from their work. The floor is concrete, but has been repainted gray half a dozen times. The walls, white, are repainted yearly.

There is a strange gummy texture to the domes— because of all the repainting— any angle is really a sharp curve. The lines in the baseboards, the joins in the rafters, even the cross shapes on the heads of screws, have all had their edges softened by fifty-some-odd layers of stark white paint. Secretly, I’ve always wanted to take an X-acto knife to the bloated wooden details, scrape away layers and see if they were always so starkly plain. I could do it too, nobody would mind. They’ll paint it again anyway. Still, though, I don’t have the nerve.

What good is a studio if the walls have to stay white? What good is an artist who doesn’t have the strange and unmistakable urge to write on white walls. Space in itself is a tool. Its job is to be messed up, to be scuffed. To be already broken in.

Three

Describing the furniture of the domes would be a bit like describing the exact shape of a storm cloud. Every day there is some new oddity pinned to the wall. Tables move on the hour. A new smudge of charcoal appears on the lightswitches, settling into the raised letters of ON/OFF, before it is wiped away again. A herd of drawing horses inhabits the space.

These strangely-shaped wooden benches are made to be straddled, so an artist can prop an art board onto the neck of the horse. They are the favorite of illustrators with back problems everywhere. Sometimes, the horses are clustered in one corner, stacked up on each other’s backs against the wall by the spool of butcher paper, but other times, the herd spreads out.

A daring duo ventures outdoors, a cluster tentatively approaches the sink. Others, more solitary, scatter through the room. Some have notes taped to their shoulders, variations of “be right back!” “out to lunch” or “don’t touch my stuff.” There are easels too, which one is meant to stand up at as they work. There is always a backless stool in front of an easel.

There is a cabinet of objects. Random, mostly. Glass vases, plaster statues, plastic fruit and discarded cutlery. There are four or five mannequin heads. Their hair is too shiny. Their painted sclera have chipped away, but for some reason their pupils and irises remained. There is a plastic skeleton suspended in a metal frame. It swings limply when rolled from place to place.

There are towers of stools, and stacks of easels piled by the door. Four grey tables— the sturdy kind, like you’d find in a mechanic’s shop– are sometimes draped with elegant displays of fabric, with objects from the cabinet organized in precise positions. These still-lifes-in-progress are often outlined in blue or cream masking tape. Scrawled in Sharpie will be something along the lines of “Do NOT touch under any circumstances!!!”

Four

It’s sort of panopticon-ish, being in the domes at night. Windows on all sides, casting slivers of warm orange light onto the outside world. I think it’s three AM, or thereabouts. I’m not allowed to check the time. Checking the time makes the work go slower.

I just got here. It’s only midnight. This is due tomorrow. Work. I take a sip of Monster Energy, and notice the weight of the can that I have drunk a little more than half. The jagged claw-mark logo makes me feel as though I am doing something dangerous but necessary, like I’m a superhero ingesting the serum that gives me my powers.

It’s a thought that will sound stupid in the light of day, but right now it’s night, my back aches, and to stop moving is to risk falling asleep where I sit. I’ve spent the last hour packing colored pencil into paper, coating fine fibers with waxy pigment until the page simply won’t accept any more.

A loud thunk startles me out of my stupor, the following hum tells me that the ancient heating system has finally decided to be of use. Concentration broken, I stand up and unceremoniously back away from the drawing horse I’d been straddling.

With the length of the room between my work and me, I stare at the half-finished picture of a brown leaf. I realize that the whole damn thing is off-center by an inch. Cognitively, I register this as an annoyance. My body doesn’t waste the energy to supply the feeling.

Accidentally, I catch a glimpse of the plain analogue clock perched above the door. It’s 4:45 am. I wonder if I’ll take a break to watch the sunrise.

Five

There is a small legion of fingerprints on the back of a white wood chair. It probably would be hundreds in total, but there’s no way to know. They’ve all smeared together into a cloudy grey splotch. The faucet at the back of the room is so covered in paint, it’s impossible to tell what color it originally was.

Recently, somebody working in blue acrylic paint has finger-painted a smiley face atop the spigot. There is one handprint on the sole pillar. It is charcoal. The palm and the fingers appear on one side of plywood. The thumb wrapped around to create a lone smudge on the other.

Whoever left it pressed their weight into their fingertips and their hypothenar, leaving a gap where the palm ought to connect to the thumb. I’ll bet they grabbed the pillar, unthinkingly, as they helped themself down from the adjacent platform. I know that this particular handprint has been there for years, left on the only part of the domes that is not repainted.

Six

They were built as a temporary structure. They were built in the 1960’s. They’ve got no address. The walls get thicker and rounder every year. They are messy. Writing a final sentence is a relief. My hands are itching. I think I’ll go write on the walls.