How to Paint Nature
Paint a silhouette: just the back of the person, maybe the bike they’re pulling up the too steep road, a few strands of hair blowing in one direction to convey a sense of wind. The silhouette stands in the bottom right-hand corner of the painting–anywhere but the center; the scenery must claim the viewer’s focus. The viewer remembers taking the long way home, dwarfed by sunsets and full moons and silent lakes.
It’s also a memory of sneaking out of a humid bedroom one night to sit on a smooth rock beside the bug-zapping LED lamp, watching a sprinkle of stars in the sky. And how they sparkled: an illuminating white growing almost as rapidly as the rising sun, a timid purple-white of the distant star whose shy twinkle lived on only in hindsight, a blotched blue-white where memory melded individual stars into clusters. Paint the sky with watercolor: shades of deep almost-grey purple for the clouds, paler where the sun peeks over the edge, darker where the night tucks fireflies away and the electric blue lamp coaxes a shadow from rock. Let the pigment and gum-arabic splash onto paper in splotches; count the miniature ripples under the brush.
In his small city apartment, the viewer sits by the window, the eyes to a never-quite-blue sky and slabs of concrete wall stained in graffiti marks, blood, chalk. The most prominent clouds come from the power plants–large masses of pillowed soot covering windshields and buildings. People are everywhere: sitting in a transit concrete truck, charging past others on the crosswalk, kneeling on the curb with cardboard signs asking for money, waiting in line to the food truck that sells only hot dogs. You won’t like it there, everyone told him. Maybe not, he thought. But he is better off here in his apartment drawing the curtains at night because he knows the stars won’t be visible than back there in a childhood home hidden in memory, expecting a polychromatic sky dotted with light only to find here and there are all the same now.
Brush bristles against skin, stroke after stroke until body flattens into canvas and flesh dilutes to ink and water.
Bio: Lucy Zhang is a writer masquerading around as a software engineer. She watches anime and sleeps in on weekends like a normal human being. Her work has appeared in Atlas & Alice, Okay Donkey, Jellyfish Review, trampset, Barren Magazine, and elsewhere. She can be found at https://kowaretasekai.wordpress.com/ or on Twitter @Dango_Ramen.