The handsome man’s hobby was painting landscapes and portraits, mostly with watercolor, sometimes with oil. His favorite location to set up his easel and palette was in the live oak shaded park in the heart of Fairhope Town, a cozy seaside village where he’d lived for close to thirty years.
Live oaks, lilies, and seascape scenes with abundant and varied wildlife were his favorite landscape studies, while his preferred portrait subjects were well proportioned females possessing unique, yet dangerously alluring faces, and males with bizarre and repulsive facial features. He sometimes thought that if there was a god, he had a ghastly and sick sense of humor, along with a sadistic lack of compassion and mercy, for allowing some of the human anomalies he saw from his artist’s perch. These observations led him to a de facto atheistic view he had never had cause to re-consider or question.
Regularly, while composing a colorful masterpiece, he would be approached by strangers looking over his shoulder, or worse yet, confronting him face to face, sometimes so close he would catch whiffs of odors he judged beyond civilized and appropriate for one with his sensibilities. Simply put, he was appalled by most of humankind, and detested the useless swarming hordes of bodies he saw around him. It wasn’t easy to be an aesthete, with gifts of observation, and an ability to render to canvas the profound and ineffable. But his need to document in color and form man’s fate and nature’s magnificent tapestry was overwhelming.
Over the years he’d perfected techniques for repelling unsavory passersby who invariably distracted him from his compositions. He particularly detested dog owners who came around and had trouble controlling their uncouth beasts. The toy or accessory variety annoyed him more than the brutish and smelly types that always appeared scheming to break their leashes and lunge at him. Their pitiful yips, snarls, sniffings, and worst of all, their dribblings splattering his feet forced him to devise a method whereby he could permanently dispatch them and their minders from his workspace.
One day, as he worked his brush across the canvas, a repeat character, apparently homosexual, with toy poodle in tow, made an appearance and stood just a little too close for his comfort. The aesthete told the poodle owner a story of having spent his youth in Chinatown and developing a taste for classical dog meat dishes, and how he believed that, if sauteed with garlic, olive oil, and midget mushrooms, with side of Szechuan sauce for dipping, poodle fillets would likely be delicious. The pesky dog owner grew agitated, barked a command to his poodle, and scurried off to never be seen again. His methodology had worked! He had peace again as his brush performed it’s ritual on canvas, and his thoughts turned to the image forming before him. The portrait study evolving on his canvas today was of a woman who’d bothered him earlier in the day as he was finessing his tubes of pigment, and by all appearances would be a perfect subject to explore. She’d approached him rather cautiously, yet clearly with hint of deception in her eyes, and stood too near for his comfort, smelling of perfume he found intimidating and unsuitable for anywhere but a bedroom or a brothel. Her lines and proportions though were profound, causing a creative swelling within him at once. He had his portrait for the day! The perfume though was causing him to choke for fresh air. She had yet to offer a smile, and stood staring at him, taunting him with her chest thrust provocatively in his direction. He’d seen enough and was gagging on the aroma she was giving off. He had to drive her away and focus on capturing her true essence on canvas.
“You’re attractively built, but reek of riches and privilege. I’ll render you but won’t befriend you, or be your lover,” he stated to her, certain his words would drive her away quickly. Her eyes glowed thermite and scorched the air between them. She turned and walked away, hopefully he thought, to never be seen again. He was elated! He’d found inspiration for the day’s work, and found the perfect combination of words to drive her seductive aroma away from his sensitive nose! He nick-named her “Aromatic Woman” for ease of recall.
After a well-earned respite from distraction, during which he was able to flesh out and define the artistic essence of the mysterious woman he’d offended, he spied a repeat nemesis ambling toward him. This man had been his subject a month previously, and possessed only one eye, and lips which appeared made of ebony, grotesquely shaped like mirror image horseshoes. He also reeked of gin and institutional disinfectant, seemed mute, and based on his lone eye’s rolling about and pulsing like an angry jellyfish, he appeared to be mad, or at least clinically insane. Luckily for the aesthete, the curious man veered at the last minute, toward a different destination.
Work progressed nicely and the artist was content, his mind wandering to thoughts of the hopelessness of man’s fate, and the mysterious qualities inherent to the women he’d rendered over the years. As he brushed pigments on the image of the aromatic woman, he felt a slight furry nudge to his sandaled foot. His hand ceased movement and he looked down from his easel to see a tiny black kitten perched upon his foot. ‘My oh my, I’ll be damned’ he thought. The creature peered up at him, eyes huge and filled with essence of wonder and awe. The aesthete was transfixed. He’d never seen anything like what confronted his eyes, and felt a whispering in his heart.
The kitten meowed softly, it’s tiny claws dug into his foot, and rather than feeling irritation the aesthete felt a miracle had just visited him at his artist’s perch. He reached down, gently grasped the kitten, and hoisted it up and against his chest. The kitten gripped his sweater, held fast, and made a sound he interpreted as one of pure delight. He felt transformed! The painting on the easel before him suddenly glowed with a clarity and vibrancy he’d never seen before in his work, and the aromatic woman’s face he’d just painted revealed an otherworldly quality on the canvas.
Just then he heard a woman’s voice behind him say “I see you’ve found my little one. Her name is Bella.” He turned to see the aromatic woman standing there smiling, her eyes on the canvas he’d been working on. “You do my beauty justice sir, but your words earlier may need to be reconsidered and returned to where they came from, or you may never see Bella again. It’s clear that the two of you have bonded! My name is Aruma, and yours is?”
CP Butchvarov
2023
Copyright © 2023 by CP Butchvarov