daredevilkink | Prompt Post #3

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Prompt Post #3

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hey can I combine my idea here with this other prompt?
http://daredevilkink.dreamwidth.org/1296.html?thread=2117904#cmt2117904
(for a Karen/Vanessa fic?)

- ayrt

OP here is an art theorist themselves and would give my left arm and half of my soul for art nerd!vanessa and vanessa/karen like holy GODS that would be the greatest ever.

so yeah go for it anon!!! I'm really excited!

Vanessa is twenty-two when she stands in a hushed room with white-painted walls and careful lighting, a pile of brightly-wrapped candy piled in the corner. It's a shattered rainbow at her feet, spilling over the glossy hardwood floor.

She does not need to read the placard to know this piece; she's heard about it, she feels it, right down to her bones.

(Her life drawing teacher died just this past spring, so, so thin that she couldn't look at him in the hospital without remembering how vine charcoal snapped in her fingers the first time she tried to make a mark with it. His partner had thanked her for the flowers, already distant, already following in his beloved's footsteps.)

Alone, she allows the tears to fall until they are spent, and then she sets her jaw, picks up a piece of candy and unwraps it. It's not very good, but then, that's not the point.

She tucks the wrapper in her pocket and moves on to the next room.

***

The girl can't be more than twenty-two when Vanessa first sees her in the gallery. She's standing in front of a variegated field of green, so lush and rich that it seems to pulse on the wall like a growing thing, like grass and jungle and sickness. There is something very pretty about the scene, this girl with corn-silk hair and sky-blue eyes staring at the verdant canvas like she can consume it, take it into herself if only she looks hard enough. Vanessa is loath to disrupt the moment, so she watches instead, observing carefully.

There is something wild about this girl, like a stray, or, no, like something feral from the woods looking for a refuge. Like the first wolf who laid beside a camp fire, hoping to rest. Elegant in her rawness, her unselfconsciousness as she moves about the room. Long limbs, wide eyes, most would probably associate her with a deer, but like calls to like, and so Vanessa can sense the fight in her, not flight.

The girl is carrying a notebook - no, a sketchbook, because for all the plainness of the cover, the smudges of graphite on the outside of her palm gives her away.

An artist, Vanessa thinks to herself, smiling. Oh, this will be a treat.

- tbc -

The piece in the first scene is "Untitled" (Portrait of Ross in L.A.), by Felix Gonzalez-Torres. It's one of my favorite sculpture pieces, and if you don't know about it, do look it up.

ohhh, anon, you have my attention

I hope to do well by it and that you enjoy the rest. :)

oh, this is beautiful. the idea of karen like a wolf to be tamed - that is perfection.

Thank you! I find Karen very interesting, and can't wait for the show to tell us more about her... 'till then: headcanons and fic!

Her name isn't Karen Page; that's the name she'd made up for herself when she planned to run away from home. Not some juvenile daydream, pretending she'd be rescued by a handsome stranger, no. A plan.

She might be a cliche, but at least she knows it, uses it to her advantage. She plays up her blue eyes, her blonde hair, her unfamiliarity with the city to let people underestimate her. Takes care of her teeth, her shoes, her clothing, so she looks presentable, looks put together, even when she's living in a studio walk-up and skipping meals so she can afford supplies for school.

Karen keeps something sharp in her pocket, always. X-acto knife, scissors, box cutter, wood carving tool, chisel... it changes depending on the classes she takes so she has a plausible excuse, but she's never without a blade.

Other things she always keeps hidden but always on hand: a birth certificate from an absent-minded former roommate, a prepaid credit card, and the key to a locker in a train station where she keeps a stash of essentials. Also a pack of cigarettes and a dead lighter: it's shocking, the amount of information, the number of places a pretty young girl can get access to when she needs a light from a helpful stranger.

And a sketchbook. Always, always a sketchbook.

Of all the things she keeps on her (just in case, just in case), it's the latter she uses the most often. She's never had to flee, despite her readiness, but not a day goes by that she doesn't draw.

If Karen was good at reinventing herself when she left her godforsaken town and her godforsaken family, it's nothing compared to her art. It had been the final key to escaping her old life, her portfolio earning her a scholarship to Pratt, and now she gets steady income doing editorial illustration while she works part-time at the local copy shop.

In her free time, she goes to galleries and museums to continue her education.

She learns as much from the people as she does the art.

***

Karen had forgotten how much she missed the space.

The canvas in front of her must be ten feet wide, and if Karen stands at the right spot, it will fill her whole field of vision, periphery to periphery. Green like grass, like clover, like sentinel cornstalks closing around her in refuge. Like a canopy of leaves in high summer, catching the light and the wind while she nestles safe in the crook of a tree, high above the ground.

She's not alone in the room. There's a slow click-click-click behind her from the heels of another woman circling the room.

Karen had seen her when she'd come in. She hadn't been looking at the paintings, so she must work here.

She's not circling the room, she's circling Karen.

Karen smiles to herself and moves onto the next painting, a field of blue like the wide, open sky.

- tbc -

OP is so here for this fill ohmygod.
perfection

yay, glad to hear it, thank you!

i love this so much. it's poetry. please, please continue!

thank you! ~^_^~

One of the most important things that Vanessa had learned in her first drawing class was that line was a fictional construct. There are edges, where gradations of gray contrast against each other, but it's rare for true lines to occur naturally. The same goes for black and white. Everything has a tint, a shade, saturation of a hue. No light is pure, no shadow is without texture.

She learned to muddy a page with charcoal and a chamois rag only to draw into it with a soft eraser, pulling the illusion of solidity from the fog, volume from the flat page. She was taught the five basic regions of shading, from highlight to core shadow, and to blend and blur between them to indicate material, whether slick and shiny or soft and matte. She learned that negative space was as important as positive space, and that a blank area on the page must be a conscious choice, else it indicates a failure to observe closely enough.

And the single most important thing that Vanessa learned in school was to observe, to truly see.

When children are young, they draw in symbols, boxy houses with triangle roofs, smiley faces and starburst suns, stick figures for families, and half-circles for boats hovering above rows of scalloped waves. Pictographs like cave paintings, like hazard signs, like symbols on a map. And then they begin to realize that their symbols are inaccurate and that drawing reality is difficult. It requires work and practice, like any other skill. After that grows a slow split, between the discouraged and the determined.

The latter became artists.

More accurately: the latter have the potential to become artists. The world continuously tests their resolve, in small ways and in large.

Vanessa was a respectable, if not exemplary, artist. As it turned out, her eye was better than her hand; now, she stands as a gatekeeper, a riddle at the threshold to fame, a trial, a test, a challenge.

The consolation for those artists who pass is that she's as formidable to buyers, as well, demanding more than money for the work she sells, but also a genuine appreciation. The artists know their work is going to be valued, and customers know that if they invest in a piece, it will not only be financially valuable, but it will also hold significance, be theirs in a way that money alone cannot buy.

Her commission rate is spectacular and slightly outrageous, but then again, so is her gallery's reputation. Vanessa Fisk's eye for talent is renowned.

So it is with some satisfaction that, when she introduces herself to the sharp little thing in a knockoff Burberry jacket, she sees those blue eyes go wide in recognition.

"I'm Karen," the girl stammers, taking her hand and shaking it. "Karen Page."

"Well, it's lovely to meet you, Karen," Vanessa says. "You wouldn't happen to be an artist, would you?"

- tbc -

shit, that response above should be numbered 3/?, sorry.

ooh, so perfect!

The hardest lesson for Karen to learn - one that she was still learning, to be honest - was the proper order of things.

For instance: as a right-handed artist, it's best for her to work from left to right, especially when drawing or inking or painting. Otherwise the side of her palm smudges the lines, her cuff drags in the paint, she doesn't notice the hair caught in the gesso until it's too late. She can usually fix those mistakes, though. It can be a fiddly process, but Karen's gotten used to it.

Color is a different matter. With chalk pastel, colored charcoal, oil pastels; with watercolor and colored pencils; with most of the pigmented media she uses, really... she ought to work light to dark, as the latter will always muddy the former.

Dark will always irrevocably taint light, and there's no going back.

Working with media of varying opacity requires careful planning, patience to watch the piece develop slowly, emerging from the faintest of washes, like an old polaroid photo.

Karen's not always as patient as she should be.

(Again, she's still learning.)

***

The woman in front of her is not just a gallery employee, she's Vanessa Marianna.

Karen takes a deep breath. She can do this. She doesn't have her portfolio, doesn't have her business cards, what is she, new? Fuck. This is what she gets for thinking that today was going to be her day off.

Karen swallows, squares her shoulders, and puts on her best smile.

After all, this is hardly the worst situation she's found herself in.

She can do this.

- tbc -

I'm so in love with this.

(are you posting this on the WIPs post? because everyone needs to know this fic is happening, omg)

Yay, glad to hear it!

(...there's a WiPs post?)

Yep, there's a link to it up in the main part of the post! It's very new, so. ^^^^^^^^

neat, thanks! :)

Oh shit, I'm the OP of the Vanessa/Art prompt and I'm only finding this now!

This is fantastic so far! It makes me feel very nostalgic for art school, haha. You really know your stuff, author anon! <3

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Prompt Post #3

Re: Karen, drawing

Re: Karen, drawing

Fill: "Untitled Portrait Series" 1/?

Re: Fill: "Untitled Portrait Series" 1/?

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Fill: "Untitled Portrait Series" 4/?

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