863. Sunrise

One last piece written in class, about darkness and sunrise:

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In college I was a painting major, which meant that I had to fit dozens of hours each week of creating art into a week that already contained dozens of hours of reading the Iliad and contemplating Medieval economics. The best solution I could find was to paint at night, all night, but I hated the smell of turpentine in a tiny, airless studio. So, instead, I moved outside to the lawn in front of my dorm. My friends thought I was clever and eccentric; my teachers, nuts; and I had no idea what I thought because I was too tired. I could see neither my subjects, usually some trees, nor the canvas in front of me, but was determined to draw every possible spark of ambient light into my eyes and then squeeze them back out onto the canvas. I put on headphones and blasted Bach motets into my ears in hopes that soaring voices and geometric harmonies would somehow bounce like sonar off the strange, hulking shapes in front of me and define new shapes through the paint at the end of my brush. I would work until dawn, when light began to seep onto the grass, and then discover how utterly wrong, or completely right, I was about the mirror of creation on my canvas.