Solo A contract of an artist's discontent

[Valo]

7th Winter 512AV Valo's house A commission to an artist is more precious than a chest full of treasure - for treasure is just an illusion and a commission is the ultimate chance to prove one self as an artist to a client. And clients make an artist. They put the bread on Valo's table and coal in his hearth. A commission is a contract for an artist to sell their's soul to something that care not about at all, but it's the mizas they care about. And the commissioner had promised to make this Inarta's time worth while. perhaps she was a noble of some sort, or merely a rich woman, he cared little. Most important thing was that there was enough coin in her pockets to compensate his efforts. Valo had always thought him self to be a man of passion and it was that passion which drove his art and everything he did in life flourished from it. He though that the passion within him gave life to his many wonderful ideas, which he then transferred onto canvas or paper. Zeltiva had shown him he was wrong. He was just another fool to sell his hands away from a hope of a more comfortable lifestyle. He had no love for architecture. It bored his eyes to tears and rid him of any inspiration. There was no life in buildings. Life was in people and animals and abstract. He ached for new ways and techniques to portray that life and to combine live subjects with mathematics and mechanics which drove such abstract. He had a lot of love for cubism and surrealism and modernism. That to him was real art. And above all he could never become bored with the human face, no matter how many times he drew it, for the face held so much passion and expression. The fact would identify the person which in turn would identify the painting, give it a sense of purpose. And purpose was key. An elaborate purpose in the weave of lifelines that entwined reality with a divine dreaming, which Valo simply called by the name of inspiration. However inspiration didn't sell... architecture did. Architecture was a conglomeration of empty shells who's only purpose was to defy nature and it's elements. To stand between a person and the wild. And perhaps the contents would prove very interesting, for items told stories about their owners; but all Valo would paint were the very shells that withheld information about the lives that took place within them. If one wished to watch architecture, they could simply look out the window . Valo wondered how many more architectural paintings he would have to paint until people become aware of this fact. He had ventured out into the biting cold of winter for several days and making studies of the sight he was going to paint, for it was too cold and wet to be standing in the middle of the street, painting some elaborate canvas. In fact it was too cold to even be drawing and many times his fingers went numb and there was pain in his joints. Hot tea helped, but truly he preferred to stay indoors where the warmth of his hearth kept his tools of the trade in good health. None the less the sketches and colour studies had to be complete before he would start painting, for there's only so much an artist can pull out of their own imagination before the painting begins looking nothing like the subject. There were five sketches all together. For of them were small and simple, with only the basic outlines filled in with possible colour schemes of varying levels of warmth in the hues. All fit nicely on just one sheet of paper and were painted in water colour. One was primarily green and one primarily grey, but Valo decided to go with the warmest colour scheme to prevent his painting from looking so dreary. No one wanted a dark, depressing painting to hand on their wall. This winter wasn't a good time of year for deciding on colour schemes for the artist's imagination had to work over time to imagine compensate for the lack of proper saturation in real life scenery, as if he was looking though a filter. He would have to pull the basic colour from overcast hues without making them look overly pretentious. Several times he would stop and thing what colour the object he was focused on really was, without allowing him self to paint what he saw. Instead an ideal world had to take shape in the final piece. He formed annotations around the little paintings. With the very point of his pencil, he scribed tiny letters at a slant in any space available on the paper. "Abundance of green tones." he would write. "Cold shades of mint and neutrals to describe the..." and an arrow pointing to an area where such colour would be needed. The italic letters seemed to visually join the separate sketches together, forming an aesthetic connection between then, like a bridge of elongated 'g's and 'j's, rounded 'l's and perfectly spherical 'o's and 'w's and 'u's. His slender fingers scribbled that elegant if not a little chaotic calligraphy of his until the whole sheet of paper could have passed for a work of art. The very last sketch was a perfect architectural sketch in charcoal of the docs of Zeltiva in the higher ground vantage point where he stood. It took him several hours but finally he had the perfect placing of each building, each roof top and each boat in sight. It wasn't as difficult is it would seem to some, for the sketch was a mirror image of his field of view. Not a single object hovered out of place. But Valo had a technique for ensuring this perfection. He would find him self a focal point, this being the World's End Grotto - the granite building constructed in such a peculiar way that it seemed at odds with everything else around it, an obvious foal point to be taken advantage of - and he drew it flawlessly, with every wall and every line and every feature precisely positioned. He would then take various measurements of it, by holding the distance marked with a finger nail on his pencil, and used this to position the surrounding area. Soon a whole cluster of buildings appeared on the paper. Then in turn, he would take the measurements of those clusters in the same way, to refer objects existing further away. Many times he would hold out his pencil on a stretched arm and close one eye, adjusting it to line the angle of the object he was drawing and then transferring that line to the paper. Very light lines began to appear where they did not exist to map the positions of boats in relation to the buildings and soon the scenery was complete and looked as if it was a black and white version of Zeltiva, seen though some magical window. He had began this sketch at noon, but the meticulous nature of his work led him into the afternoon, when the mellow sunlight cast sideways shadows upon the buildings. This was taken into consideration of shading, for Valo had prided him self thoroughly on his tonal drawings. With a vast scale of mark intensity, he worked to produce these highlights and lowlights which would then in turn inform his colour work. A transferable technique, one would call it. And finally towards the very late hours of the afternoon when the clouded sun however very low in the sky, casting it's diffused light over the docs with a tints of purple, the sketch was complete and Valo was shivering. He had returned home that night in almost child like ecstasy to finally begin real work on his commissioned painting. he set up a great canvas on an easel and seating him self down on the only chair in the house, he began to transfer elements of the sketch onto the stretched white texture. So much preparation goes into making a piece like this. So many hours spent on initial drawings and as sleep rendered him unable to proceed with work in the very late hours of the night, he had not yet started painting. The next day an outline of all the buildings in the scenery awaited him. The Grotto was no longer the focal point, though it remained an eye catcher. All the invisible directions, the lay lines that existed within the structure yet were not marked on the canvas it self, fed into the sea. It seemed almost that they pointed to it; and quite rightly so, for that was to be the most colourful part of the scenery. Funny thought it was; invisible hands of these granite buildings of Zeltiva, all pointing towards the sea. It was a metaphor for the nature of the city, it seemed. And if one would look close enough, they would find that the very peripheral structures that hang on the very edges of the canvas were not quite positioned properly. Perhaps this was because the sluggishness that took over the artist as he struggled to finish the outlines before surrendering his body to blissful sleep. Not that anyone would really notice, but somehow they added a much needed sense of atmosphere into the otherwise cliché painting. A signature, is it was, to the manifestation of originality of the artist's work. Anyone could copy what they saw, but to do it imaginatively; that to Valo was the real meaning of being an artist. To see the world in a different way to everyone. A peculiar way. A defiant way. After a quick breakfast and a moment for Valo to collect him self, it was finally time to begin painting. His home echoed silence with nothing but the occasional footsteps of citizens outside, disrupting his concentration. It was a blissful kind of alienation. No one to distract him, no one to notice if he would suddenly fall dead and begin rotting. These thoughts crossed his mind frequently when it was filled with such profound quietness.

[Valo]

Many times Valo had thought him self mad, for the strangest of ghosts seemed to haunt his mind when alone. And a lonesome life was that of an artist. Sometimes he found him self conversing with the materials at hand, commentating his every action, speaking out loud every thought that came to his head. "Yellow ochre mixes with green based blues to produce a cool mint. The warmth of the yellow contrasts the cool of the blue, forming a grey undertone. It prevails over cadmium lemon yellow which produces a much more unnaturally vibrant hue."he sighed to him self. "Seems that all the natural hues have some kind of a grey undertone to it and producing simple secondary colours would be just too easy if that were not the case." The deeper he delved into this chaotic maddening realm of his work, the more he felt fragile. His expectations of him self rose with his ever increasing artistic abilities. He became increasingly frustrated if something was not going to plan. It was a truth Valo was in the process of learning - that for a while art is a catalyst for relaxation and an aid in developing perception; but the moment it ceases to be a hobby and becomes work, is then the artist becomes a slave. His very passion becomes his very dismay. There were two mediums that Valo was particularly fond of when it came to oil painting. He found that by varying the quantities of each and adding them to the paint, it was possible to get the most out of such a painting as this, for canvas can become quite a tedious surface to paint on. And simply slapping raw oil paint onto the canvas would mean the whole work would end up cracking in several years time. Working with additional oil mediums helped to prolong the lifespan of the work in which Valo, despite his discontentment, took great pride. The first medium was white spirit. Of course most artists would have used turpentine, but that was too expensive and white spirit performed just as well. It is technically used to clean brushes, after all the oil medium used to suspend the pigment in paint does not mix with water and is therefore very difficult to wash out. But because of the white spirit's chemistry, it dissolves oil paint like a charm. And that very property allows the process of thinning out the paint by mixing with just a tiny amount of said medium. The trick is to keep the thick consistency of the paint thick, but not too thick that it's hard to move around the canvas. The very base layer should be thin and just a means to map out the colours of the painting, similarly like within the water colour paintings he had done beforehand. White spirit is a wondrous mixing medium, thought Valo as he dipped the very tip of his paintbrush in the clear liquid and began mixing the colours upon his palette. It dulled down the natural glisten of the oil medium within the paint, leaving it somewhat matt when dried. It had an interesting texture, not as smooth as it would otherwise have, but not so different either. The brush marks seemed less prominent, though perhaps that was due to the thinning out of the paint. But it seemed to render this particular kind of paint much more pleasant to work with. Soon the palette was plastered with infrequently mixed colours which began transferring periodically onto the canvas, covering the grain texture with that smooth one of the paint. Blue hues for the sea and grey ones for the buildings. A solid lavender tones blue for the sky, into which he will later work into. And towards the hour in the day in which morning begins shifting into midday, the very first layer of the painting was completed and Valo was ready to abandon it for the next few days until it dried. The downfall of oil paint was that it took far too long to dry.

[Valo]

The beauty of painting was indeed that paint took it's time whilst drying. In that time an artist could accomplish many a thing and Valo was not the artist to waist precious time. Over the past few days a lot of his work had come to completion. Most of them were oil paintings, ranging anywhere from elaborate to overly simplistic but elegant. Most were architecture. When again he had placed the only chair in his house at the easel upon which the painting of the docs was suspended, he found him self wishing that the work on large canvas was over. Valo had truly not been a fan of prolonged projects for they had a habit of dragging out stupidly. Then again he had never been quite a fan of prolonged commitment. Art sometimes was like women, convoluted and hard to understand. Linseed oil was another oil medium that had the ability to dissolved mix with the oil medium in which the paint was suspended. However this one gave much more flexibility to the resultant paint-medium complex. Using this would men that the paint on the top layers would not end up cracking open during the drying period, or later on in life. The last thing for which an artist would want to be remembered was a piece of work which did not survive for eternity. Art was meant to be eternal. Not only that, but the medium also provided much shine to the paint, rendering it luxurious and glossy. Of course there were glossing mediums and top coats which one could put over the painting to ensure such glossiness and a longer lifetime; but this was way past Valo's area of expertise. Besides such top coat had to be applied at least two seasons after the completion of the painting and the red haired painter had simply not the time nor the effort. he needed money and needed it fast. Each layer of paint was a mixed ration of both mediums. The white spirit and the linseed oil. The ration of spirit to oil however, decreased with each consequent layer, rendering the very top one to be purely linseed oil and paint alone. All the elaborate tones had not taken shape. The sky perhaps was the most striking feature of the painting, for by the use of heavy brush marking, applied with a hard bristled brush, was suspended swirling storm clouds within it. From these clouds of all shades of grey, a shaft of light came down, manifesting it self in a gentle injection of warmer hues into the area which it mapped. And consequently the boats in the doc were painted with much more vibrant colours than they would have otherwise been. Glossy surfaces of vibrant reds and ambient blues now hovered within the green-grey hues of the waters of the paintings. Upon them the World's End Grotto gazed, surrounded by it's army of grey buildings. Each one of them infrequently painted with a clever use of marks to describe the stone texture. And the very peripheral structures leaned into the centre, closing round the boats like a swarm of prying individuals. No greenery to divide them. Only cold stone and a contrasting scene of light in the centre. the painting was complete and Valo had never been more glad. By the 7th of Winter, the work had dried and it was ready for collecting. The woman had come in person, early morning, dressed in her abundant finery and with a handful of compliments about the work she had left, seemingly satisfied. The work of an artist is to please, after all. Not to create art. And with a sight Valo was once again left within his own world, his own head crammed with thoughts, his own loneliness. Ah how he wished that one day people begin to perceive art in a way in which he did. Art being something truly original and meaningful, not another silly landscape.

[Cloud]

XP Reward!

From the sky falls your reward!

PC Name: Valo

Experience

Skill	XP Earned
Drawing	+3
Painting	+2
Calligraphy	+1

Lores

none

Notes :

I've said this before but it never hurts to give a reminder, reviewing your writing helps out a lot! There were a few places with a misspell, which made reading it a bit silly actually. Other then that though good work!

Job well done! If you have any questions or concerns pm me.