This will likely be a bit of a series, but it certainly doesn't need to be. This story stands on its own. I'll let the readers, or rather, the voters and
the commenters
decide that. Do you understand that, Literotica readers? To have a voice, you need to comment... Anonymous or logged in, it doesn't matter.
Regardless, please enjoy this for what it is, a hopefully fun romp. As always, my disclaimer is: Please don't expect deep truths or stark realism, I only aspire to the plausibly ridiculous.
----------
Artist in the Park
----------
It was a perfect storm. And by perfect storm, I mean it was an absolutely gorgeous fall day. The elements of the perfect storm were that I had no current commissions to work on, and yet I was home, instead of on the road at a show. Seriously, this was a rare, perfect storm. I try to avoid those two non-revenue-producing conditions, especially in combination, like the plague. As for the gorgeous fall day part? Those are just less common than I'd like where I live.
But this was indeed such a day, and so I had taken a walk to the park... to work. I had two pads of heavy paper, one was two by three feet, while the smaller was a foot square. My case held my current second-best set of pastels, and other miscellaneous supplies. I wandered until I found just the right place, unslung my chair from my shoulder, and positioned myself atop a slight rise with a view of two irregular copses of trees. Most of the trees were maples, but there were some others mixed in, including several young elms in the new, disease-resistant variety that I'd read about. All were in incredibly vibrant fall colors, that brief moment of vital perfection before everything falls to the ground in death, and the bare, ragged branches slumber for the winter.
I smiled. The weather would hold for three days, according to my phone. In that time, I could move around the park and do an extensive series of pieces. All different angles and times of day, depicting the same set of trees. I would pretend I was Monet in London. Hopefully, a few of the studies would be good enough for me to make prints and lithographs of to sell in quantity.
I started with the smaller pad, to get a feel for the colors of the trees.
I eased back in the chair and ripped out two or three very quick, even for me, warm-up pieces. I liked the mix of colors in the second one especially, and left it face up beside me for reference as I opened the big pad.
By 10:30, I had a big, colorful mess. It was trash when I considered what I had been trying to accomplish with it, but I also knew it was pretty, in the bland, inoffensive style that suburban housewives liked to buy and put in their hallways or laundry rooms. I set it aside. It would be worth finishing back at my condo later.
But that meant that I was facing another piece of blank paper. I scanned around to see which area I wanted to focus on, and frowned.
I wasn't bored with this already, but I sure as hell was going to be by the end of three days of rendering trees on paper. I debated sticking with the project for just the one day.
Movement caught my eye. In the open greensward of the downward slope between my vantage and the trees, I saw a mother and her two little children, both girls, setting up a blanket for a morning in the sun. The little girls were both blurs of blonde motion in their pretty, coordinating but not matching, blue dresses. I sort of half-recognized the mom, in that I had seen her in the park before. She was tall, and had a willowy figure that was attractive, but not sexy, and a bland face made interesting by a truly generous hawk nose.
I usually do either figures or landscapes--seldom figures in landscapes. But trying to capture the swift movements of those kids against the tapestry of the fall foliage seemed like it might be fun. The attempt would likely end up as an unsalable mess, but I would be entertained and fulfilled by the attempt. I hadn't become an artist for the commerce.
Not that commerce wasn't important to me, and not that I wasn't good at it. The bank and I together owned a very nice third floor condo with a view of the very park in midtown where I was currently working. My home had enough space for both living area and my small studio, and I was very committed to keeping that banking relationship cordial and that ownership in place. If this little diversion didn't work, I'd get back to the pure landscapes. Landscapes were bread and butter for me.
Fortunately for my own entertainment, the piece started working fairly quickly. The little girls were easy, I found. Their defining characteristic was movement, and so they became half-figure/half-blurs, orbiting the mother. I got enough detail on each to make them recognizable, but barely.
The mother was another thing entirely. She sat there, with those long legs folded up under her on the blanket covering the grass. She hadn't even taken off her low but elegant heels. Her slender hips and loosely clad thighs were easy to capture, the color of her trousers was easy to nail-- it barely took a few, carefully matched strokes to evoke their shape perfectly.
Her torso was harder to capture without more detail than I wanted this piece to employ. Not because she was so well-endowed. Far from it. Even given the two little girls, it was clear that the Boobie Fairy had skipped the delivery for the mother.
I wondered idly if that had bothered her. She seemed extraordinarily serene. The rest of her body had been miraculously unblemished by two pregnancies, so perhaps she was content with the balance of how things had turned out. Or maybe her husband was just not a tit man...
Her face was easy to make recognizable, with that striking nose, but I still put in the most work there. I wanted to capture the odd combination of bland and striking in her features, and to do it just right. As I worked, I decided I found her face actually more than simply attractive, and the rest of her too.
I tend to develop idle affections for the subjects of my work.
This piece was definitely not going to be an unsaleable mess. I was damned near smug as I finished my initial work on the mother's image and worked outward, drawing again on my earlier studies on the fall foliage. My eyes did keep coming back idly to the mother...
A shadow fell over my shoulder.
"Wow! That's honestly incredible," said a light, feminine voice from behind be.
"Thank you," I said turning to look at my audience. I am used, when I work in places like the park, to people stopping to watch me develop a piece. I work extraordinarily fast at this stage of a work, and some want to just observe my speed in amazement. Others stop to appreciate what I'm producing.
I never mind, either way. I keep business cards on the back of my chair, in a pocket with my name and website on a little sign. You never know when a chance meeting will result in a sale.
I involuntarily took a second glance at the woman who had approached.
She was in so many ways the polar opposite of the young mother I was working up. I estimated that she was a little older than my subject, in the same range as me--33 or so. Unlike the blonde woman on my paper, my observer had russet-colored hair that swept around her face in waves. She was short, maybe five-two, and deeply tanned. Unlike the mother, this woman wore fitness attire: grass-stained white Nikes, and black yoga pants with a two-inch, raspberry colored stripe that ran from waist to ankles. The stripe was translucent from about mid-thigh downward. She had a matching raspberry sports bra up top, bits of which were intentionally visible under a shapeless white tank top.
