Story — Artist. Unknown.

2019-03-08 — JP

I just published a new short story Artist. Unknown. on The Junction on Medium. It’s about 3900 words, or a 16 minute read.

Here’s an excerpt:

Since childhood, one of the things she had liked the most about pictures — paintings or photographs — was the space outside the frame. The null space. The excluded context, left to be filled in by the imagination of the viewer. The few times that she had gone to see the actual place where famous pictures had been made, she had been disappointed, because the context somehow never lived up to what she had imagined. As she had learned to paint, she had realized that this was the real power of what she was trying to do: to situate the picture in an invisible setting, so that it extended beyond the frame, right, left, up, down, ahead, behind, and forward and backward in time.

As she stood and painted then, she wasn’t standing in the gravel by the side of the road, next to her boyfriend’s mother’s old Ford C-MAX. She was… somewhere else. She closed her eyes and breathed and opened them again and looked. The unruly patch of flowers in front of her could be a garden, the kind of garden she’d like to have, the back garden of her house, a house in a farmstead not unlike the one she saw in the distance. She was looking out past her garden at her neighbor’s farm. Beside her, curly-headed children played barefoot nearby, their mocha skin darkening in the sunshine. Behind her, in the house was a studio in a corner room with good light. On Fridays, she had a booth at the market in Lourmarin where she sold her paintings. She painted in the mornings and then picked up merguez and vegetables and the afternoon bread and and then played with the kids while Félix cooked supper.

Go check it out: Link