Chiaroscuro

The old man’s eyes stared vacant. Crow’s feet cut deep into the corners and the brilliant blue of their youth was faded with a hint of glaucoma. His hair was a burst of white flame, erupting from the spotted peak of his brow. Before him stood the canvas. A monstrosity of emptiness. A behemoth of height and width, and ever the daunting adversary. But like all the rest of them, this Goliath too would fall. His nakedness was kindly softened by the warm glow of Louis XV oil lamps, which ignited an interior fitting for a museum of antiquity, threaded with the occasional modern masterpiece. Vivid arterial red smeared his hands, upper body, right cheek and sections of a lavish hand-woven Parisian rug. A bronze Cubist bust guarded the corner of a large sheet of tarpaulin, weighed down by open tins of multi-coloured enamel paint with rouge overturned. The room was silent. The Viscount, as he had become internationally renowned, would adhere to strict rituals during his creative reverie, including the imposition of a time blanket upon the creation space through the removal of clocks, technology, windows and other temporal cues. When in creative lockdown, his house staff were on dire instruction to never interrupt him under any condition, to the point of signing legal waivers with grievous implication. Was it any wonder it took the Viscount’s agent Piper almost three weeks before summoning authorities to the discovery of his emaciated body, and several more to issue legal proceedings against the fretful staff, some of whom had already returned to their respectful countries of origin. The art world wept with platitudes over the man who would become known as the modern master, wrestling with the canvas like a madman unhinged. One prestigious editorial went so far as to call him the Jack the Postmodern Giant Slayer. Wrapped in shrouds of mystery and eccentricity, his work would skyrocket in value. With no family, his estate would be delivered into the hands of jostling cultural benefactors. However, the greatest of his oeuvre would prove his last, that final empty canvas with nought but a scrawled signature in red - the downward stroke of an artisan, a genius, a recluse, an obsessive-compulsive and a slave to the art-market - moving from this mortal plane into the next.