The canvas stared back at Yeva, bleached skull white, its blankness close enough to a grin to make her stomach churn. Her fingers wrapped tight, forming a fist around the brush hard enough to snap it. The canvas taunted her with its whiteness. Its nothing. (She hadn't slept in days.)
She hadn't painted in just as long.
The two kept step with each other, the insomnia, the failure of her creativity. She tried to break up their dance; she rained her attempts all over the studio floor. Thick, charcoal lines slashed gray newsprint. A figure that spun and refused to form on every page, tossed to the ground. Pages spread like legs and she sat in between them waiting to be birthed, waiting to birth. But the canvas stayed pure. Unmarked. Untouched.
It had to be perfect. None of her sketches had been. None of the thumbnails. None of the trials. She had only the one canvas. She couldn't get another. Couldn't make another. She sighed, stepped back. It wasn't right. It wasn't ready.
She moved to put down the brush, pick up the charcoal again. Reached for the stack of newsprint. Stopped.
That was the failure. The sunlight made everything hazy. Lack of sleep, lack of dreams, made everything a dream. So close to that sweet fountain she could taste it. It was never meant for paper. She was never meant for paper.
She'd be born on skin, wet and messy. From flesh to flesh.
Yeva dropped the dark stick. Picked up a tube of paint, squeezed a fat blob onto the gray palette. It emerged clay brown. She dipped her brush in, picked up the color and turned to her canvas.
It took up the whole easel. The bottom sat along the shelf at the foot; the top was clamped down with the last inch of the back brace. Tall, taller than her, nearly nine feet. She'd made it herself. Started the project when her sleep started to slip from her.
“Your work is too safe. You need to stand out. I wanna bring you up with me but you're not ready yet,” he had said. Ryan, the darling, the star. He ran his thumb under her eye, prodding the bruise left by the night (she hadn’t slept in days). A purple-red half ring, the sucking hungry kiss mark of her exhaustion. He looked like he would kiss her, but his phone rang. “Put more of yourself into your work!” And then he was gone.
But she already knew what he thought of her work. That's why she started the project. Linen wouldn't work. She needed something different. Something to stand out. She needed skin.
Hide.
The front was impossibly white, chemically white from the gesso but the back was still natural. She wondered if Ryan had ever done that. Stretched his own canvas. He said she had potential. Found her at a local gallery, invited her out. But still, none of his connections had come to her. She wasn't ready, he said. She shook her head, chased thoughts of him away. This was her work.
Thick gesso applied in layers hid the stitches that created the surface she craved. There hadn't been a large enough skin to create the canvas she needed, one that stretched to the heavens and so she took many. They weren't perfect at first, they were ill matched, the hides, the shape of living things and the colors, dusty rose, rose peach, close but not perfect. But she made it work. Stitched them together, slathered them over with bright white.
The back left messy, real. The wood still rough, she was no carpenter, had only invested in the bare minimum needed to cut the boards, nail them together. She spent her money on the more important tools. An artist knows where to spend and where to save for the best result. The staples, chaotic, clustered over each other but there, holding. The whole thing holding.
(She hadn't slept in days.)
The brush deposited paint on the canvas, destroying its purity with a determined swipe of burnt sienna. Yeva jerked her arm angrily across the surface, leaving harsh marks. Wet and thick at the start. Deep brown lines, the color of rust, the color of something alive left to dry, began to form a shape. Curves that became not a person but a figure, clear as anything. It burned a hole in her retina.
Insomnia settled over her like a lover, keeping her awake in the deep dark of early morning. Get out of bed, do something else the articles said. She did. She tried. Let the art take her, make something of her while she stumbled in a haze.
She made the canvas to have something to do. She’d never done it before but she found the information online, bought what she needed from sellers through Craigslist. Overnighted the tools she needed to prepare the hide. She was an artist. She knew how important the right tools were. Hauled it all into her studio. Put it together in the deep dark when she couldn't sleep.
The first was a mess. It smelled so bad and she'd ruined the skin. But she had to do it herself. She learned from exploring online. Carried the small animal, her first practice, already dead and drained into her space, her studio. It had been a ballet studio before she rented it and filled it with easels and paint and now this new practice.
Yeva cleared pencils and paper pads from a table and set the first one down. Couldn't bear to think of it as anything but the skin. Used her tools to part skin from muscle, buff titanium from peach and cadmium red. Tanned it with its own brains, a brown that leaned towards grey. She dumped the meat in the garbage. The meat was waste, she couldn’t paint on it. She just needed the skin. Upstairs her neighbors played music that thumped through the floor.
That first skin was there, all torn imperfect pieces, stitched along with the others. It was part of her canvas.
Yeva frowned, pulling her brush into a wide arc. A sweeping arm topped with slashed lines that would be fingers. A ghost of color from the nearly depleted bristles. All of it poised above a blank oval that would be a face. Would be something. As she would be something, someday. Ryan was wrong about her. She was ready. She bit at the inside of her mouth, brush floating in the air.
Was this enough?
The art called her, dragged her back to the canvas away from the doubts. The Dancer that wanted to be. The drive to create crawled along her arms, up her back and over her skull like ants. Yeva moved to brush them off. Her fingers met bandages. Chemical white. Couldn't bear to think about them. She dropped her hands, searched with her eyes until she found a stool. Dragged it over and climbed up to reach the highest parts of the canvas, to lay down the rest of the scene.
She had tried to paint trial pieces. There was only the one canvas, she had to get it right. She had meant to make a collection, a series. That was Ryan's advice. “Next time you feel something, a mood, do ten paintings about it. Instant show,” he said over one of their “mentoring sessions”. Yeva tried, it wasn’t good enough. Those canvases sat stacked against the wall, pedestrian. She needed to try again with the Dancer. Started small to get the motion, the color down. Slashes of paint. Clouds of ochre. Alzarin ground. And the Dancer. Faceless motion. Each one too small, not worth finishing. She moved to the next size and then again until a stack of canvases, half painted with the gesture of the dance, each one the form closer, more realized but not right. Because those canvases were linen and duck cloth and the Dancer needed flesh. Demanded it.
Nothing else would reveal the Dancer.
The next one was bigger and Yeva saved more of that skin. The one after that near perfect. It didn't take much to learn, not when you had an eye, not when you practiced the motions before making the first mark. These went into the piece too. How long had it been since she'd seen Ryan? How long had it been since she slept? (She hadn’t slept in days.)
No answers but there was the canvas. Finished and beautiful and unique. Just as Ryan had advised her.
Yeva mixed white and black into the rust creating tones, setting a scene haphazardly as an under painting and sighed as the warm rush of right flooded her for the first time since the drive had started. Proof that the work she had already put into this canvas made it worthy. That she was worthy. (She hadn't slept in days.)
The room closed in on her, dark flashes spun at the edges of her vision. Like wings, the afterimage of a flash, the air when you've had too much to drink. But Yeva painted, quick and bold. Heat rushed through her, her arm felt light, moved fast and free. Excitement, giddiness, the joy! Her cheeks ached as she smiled but she smiled still. This painting would mean something. This painting would be something. And then she would be something.
Brush gripped in one hand, smearing blood-rust paint over her skirts before she stopped, eyes locked on the half-realized piece before her. The movement was there, a map of lines, but it lacked some core part. Some key. Yeva wasn't sure what, she had never gotten this far with it. The art had never whispered right to her before. (She hadn't slept in days.) Something was missing.
She had gotten that way with the canvas too. She had prepared so many pieces. So many different types of skin. Gotten good, took them whole, used every part. Yeva brought them to her studio live, the skins. Made a space for them. Splashed the plastic floor with perylene maroon. The upstairs neighbors played music so loud it came through the ceiling but it didn't matter, she killed quick as silver. Butchered, if it could be called that, the meat, dumped outside the city for the vultures in heavy duty bags.
Hard work but it didn't let her sleep (she hadn't slept in days).
Yeva wasn't a butcher. She was an artist but had learned well enough, anything can be learned if you practice. Could probably make more canvases if she wanted but no, this would be the only one. This one had the most important piece. The piece that fit it all together, that whispered right.
All gesture, frenzied movement against an alien background. She held out a hand to them, brown to orange, flesh and blood to flesh and paint and her smile broke open into laughter. A wide grin, all toothy because, yes, yes, she saw the next step.
The studio will have a Dancer again, she thought. In that mass of brown leaning towards grey that lived behind her eyes beneath the buzzing and flashing that drove her to paint, she had the idea that perhaps she was channeling the spirit of the dancers that once were, capturing their essence on canvas. She liked the poetry of it. She stepped lightly over to the back wall and tugged the heavy curtains that blocked the mirrors and saw herself staring back. She hadn't slept in days.
It wouldn't let her. She understood that now. Yeva had gotten far enough with it, close enough to it to see that. Had to get it out before she could rest. Had to pour that greatness onto the surface. That Ryan had been right. She wasn’t ready before but now—now was different.
She looked at herself. She hadn’t slept in days, not since she stitched up the last of the canvas, buried her eyes in sketches and failed attempts. And before that sleep had come less and less, the soft webs of dreams falling away more and more until there was only her and the skin, a canvas now and she would make it more again.
Messy, black curls half pulled into a bun and piled on top of her head. Her eyes were two bloodshot, brown orbs that stared through bandages at her tawny colored face. The skin a little more yellow than usual but fine, it didn't matter. Her lips had never hid her snaggle tooth, broken as a child, and couldn't do it now but it didn't matter.
Below that, her body waited, covered in a loose t-shirt and a skirt. A moment's hesitation and she cast these off, tossing them into a pile until she stood bare in front of her reflection, taking in the deep fawn colored rolls of her body. The sepia points of her nipples. The midnight that settled between her thighs. She needed a model for the painting.
There is no art like that from life and the only life available was her own. Those animals she had hauled in were gone. Their blood spilled, their hides stretched. Just her now. They wouldn't have been any good anyway, they weren't right. She was right. Her neighbor turned on their music, the beat traveled through the ceiling. She walked back to the canvas, picked up the brush.
Yeva could see it all now. The messy back, her face staring back at her, her body, the Dancer.
She frowned at herself but forced her eyes to turn back to the gesture on the canvas. She swung back to the mirror, drawing her arm above her head, twisting her body, mimicking the pose.
Her red-veined eyes darted, holding the image in her (not) grey matter before she dropped her hands and dashed back to her palette.
Naked she mixed colors quickly. Crimson speared with sap green and a drop of phthalo blue, she struck the canvas. Quick brush strokes until there was a body. A head, a neck, breasts, belly and then lower, lower, lower, her own flesh and blood belly pressed to the floor to get the first layer down for the foot.
Through the ceiling she heard music. Just the bass, thumping down to her. She didn't know the song but hummed anyway. She had gotten good with her tools, with the flesh, but it was never like this, never the same as the paint. This, this was her talent. Her real skill. Her real self.
No good, she thought and struck the pose again. Her gaze this time directly on her own flesh, not a reflection but on herself. She could see how the light moved against her, sunset red, against the skin of the canvas. The air hummed and crackled. Yes, yes, she thought, excited as she painted. There, the arm long, the fingers alien almost but oh so graceful. Was that really her arm? She had never noticed but she swept the paint over the canvas, forming the Dancer. Trusting her body to know. Trusting her eye.
Then the hips and Yeva looked down at the curve of herself moving in time with that distant music. Paint what you see, she reminded her hand, not what you think you see. She made her thighs thick, her stomach the pouch she stared down at under heavy, round breasts. Not how she wished she would appear, no she painted what her mind understood from what her eyes captured.
It had to be right. That feeling, no, the sound she realized, the soft whisper of the painting said that it was right, that she was painting it true.
She hadn't slept in days.
The canvas didn't matter anymore because finally, finally Yeva was painting. Diving, spinning, reveling in it. The canvas the door, the gate and she had burst it open, spilling over onto the other side birthed in a sea of thick, wet color.
She didn't look at any part of herself twice. She painted quickly, boldly. It was her style. Ryan laughed at it, called it amateur but he didn't understand. He couldn't see. She would make sure he saw. She posed, painted, glazing cobalt to make shadows then more yellow until she, the she on the canvas, the Dancer, seemed to glow in her unfinished world.
She laid down a sky in dioxazine purple, quinacridone violet, and nickel azo yellow blended into something violent, the earth to match, like the bruises from around her eyes. All dark anger, where she was light, light as the Dancer. A temple formed around her, the ceiling ripped away, rubble at her feet all rendered in shadow. Unimportant. Only the figure was important and the figure needed a face.
Memory would serve. Her own face would serve.
She stared with her eyes, windows to her soul. Lovingly she placed them on the canvas, reproducing the whites in a pale blue, threading them with thin red lines of sleeplessness, weighing them down with the bruised lower lids to match the landscape. “She must have been dancing for ages, she's so tired,” Yeva mused, sing-song. Then the nose, upturned. The dancer's mouth hung half open in ecstasy and right there: Yeva's snaggle tooth. Broken as a child, never fixed.
Nothing left but her hair. She painted the pile, anthraquinone blue stirred with cadmium orange to make a dark storm of curls. The unruly twists followed the flow of the Dancer on the canvas. The Dancer painted as perfect as she could make it. The Dancer painted to be her.
Smiling, sighing, her eyes wide with delight she stepped back and looked at herself. Her arms held high, her body displayed in plain image against the backdrop of an ancient temple. The name of it whispered in song through the ceiling. She would write it down later but for now she took in what she had created.
She had made the flesh wet again, all those dry, stitched together bits. They had become something more.
The canvas had been right, something about it made the art stronger, more bold. The colors, the depth, it was all so much more. The sun was setting but the painting, her painting, shone brilliant and bright in the coming darkness.
Posing once more to match the painting and a warmth settled over her. Yes, it said, this is good, this is done. She spun in joy, her greatest work. She hadn't slept in days.
Covered in paint and nothing else she turned and saw in that great mirror what she had done.
“Yeva!” Ryan called from the door bursting in without knocking. “I've been trying to get a hold of you! We're supposed to go to an event tonight are you even - whoa!”
She didn't turn, could see him in the mirror, how he stopped, stared at the painting. Her painting.
“This is really, this is, wow.” Breathless, awed. No less than she deserved.
She smiled, pain shooting through her but it was all right. Art was pain.
“Oh wow, why are you naked? Yeva?”
She watched him come closer. Crossing the room in long strides.
“My god! What happened to your face girl?” He wrapped his hand around her shoulder, moved to turn her but she stopped him. “Did someone hurt you? Why didn't you call me?”
She turned then, smiled wide, showing off her broken tooth and pointed at the canvas. “It's fine Ryan. My best work.”
But he wasn't listening. He could see her face now. The perfect piece to finish her surface.
The eyes and mouth stitched shut, she couldn't have holes in the canvas. And all around it the sheep and pig skin stitched into a rectangle, stapled to the bars that held it. Under the dancer you couldn't see it but there, from behind, in the mirror reflection, it was clear.
Everything that Yeva had put into it.
She had given her all to the painting and it had eaten all, wet and hungry but finished now.
The drums from above played louder and Yeva hummed along, swaying. Ryan was talking, babbling, and calling someone but there were just the drums. The hard pound of the Dancer's feet. She could hear it now. She had reached the precipice. Transformed.
She hadn't slept in days but still she danced.