Paintin Algorithmic Blues
Crispy Kale
Kale was knelt on the bed again like a communicant before the altar. Dee left over a week ago now but she’d be back when this was finished. She’d have to be back. When she walked away she might as well have thrown away the winning lottery ticket.
Painting is a kind of all-at-once income but with the piece not being finished yet he was running low on funds. But he was managing. Just eat and drink less and in no time there’d be more money than he could count. Worse stuff had sold for millions.
And then the real work would get done. Good as this piece was it wasn’t his masterpiece. Needed peace for that. Stability and clarity. And he’d have it all soon.
An ecosystem of brushstrokes fused into the plaster. Get close enough and see the little bumps in the wall. Once put to paper, art has a life of its own. Art is where the truth goes to get dressed; these things he tells himself because they are his selling point, all artists being actors first and if not fooling themselves, fooling nobody.
He crawled off the bed and took it all in, wobbling on his feet. A topological map of the night sky with the stars represented by musical notes and the names all labelled in Greek. He shook with hunger. After downing a glass of water from the sink opposite the bed he inscribed his name in Greek:
Καλε
He wondered if during the press conference he’d be better to sit with his legs crossed or to sit straight. Painters for too long have been mysterious ivory tower folk. Leather jackets and Levi’s…that’s the new era and it starts with Starry Sky.
That’s what he called it. About as thoughtful as one can be in a three second glance. Already he was etching it into the corner.
He took out his phone and started taking photos, at least fifty he was told by a furniture salesman. Every angle and various levels of lighting. He had a feeling his masterpiece could be made with glow-in-the-dark paints. As soon as he had another wall, he’d get working on it.
When he had the photos he chose the best five and uploaded them to PaintPile. His account was fairly new – he just made it five minutes before and put as much thought into his profile as he did washing dishes. The golden rule was ‘Build it and they will come!’ People who need to try and draw people in are just making up for lacking talent.
An hour passed. Nothing. He wondered if the news had got the story yet and whether once the landlord saw all the value he’d created by leaving one of the world’s finest works on the wall, the word vandalism might need redefining.
His phone lit up but it was just about an alumni event, though he’d graduated twelve years ago.
Well it wasn’t going to happen all at once, he wasn’t that naïve. What else was annual leave for?
He sat cross-legged in the dark, eating cheesy wotsits, staining the ends of his fingers yellow, nodding off and jolting awake cold like the air was empty and distant, the world suddenly enormous after weeks with just his work.
The light was fading from behind the curtain. He wobbled off the bed and put on his shoes and went out to the retail park across the road.
In a large warehouse a store assistant in a purple polo shirt led him past the computers and TVs towards the cameras.
‘So which one’s the best?’
‘The best camera? Depends on your budget and what you need it to do.’
‘Need it to do? It’s a camera.’
‘Yeah.’
‘So can’t you guess what I need it to do? They take photos just tell me which one makes the best photos.’
‘Well what’s it for?’
‘Little project. You’ll see it soon enough. I really haven’t got forever so just show me the best one.’
‘All right…’ The assistant went into glass lockbox and retrieved one worth £2500 and assured Kale that this was the one he needed.
‘Bit pricy but…you’re sure it’s the best?’
‘The very best, sir.’
After sighing and drawing his debit card Kale drew his credit card instead and paid. Because he was investing! You have to spend money to make money and when the world saw Starry Sky these small injections were going to mean very little.
Once home, and once he’d figured out how to actually turn the camera on and take a photo, he took over fifty and uploaded the best ten to his PaintPile. And as he deleted the last post, he blushed at the sight of them. No wonder nobody had reacted. But it was different now. He lay down holding his phone just above his face, blinking a few times before the light was filling up the curtains again. He didn’t think he’d slept but he must have.
But that meant it had been hours. He checked the phone but it was empty. Just a painful white light. Not a single reaction, not even a negative one. He just lay, re-reading his caption, listening to himself breathe.
When he got out of bed he felt heavy and weak but the ping of his phone woke him back up. He tried to pick it up so fast he dropped it but when he got it back off the black carpet it read:
Don’t neglect your dental health. You’re overdue a regular check-up.
There must be a reason. Nothing happens by coincidence. The title? Is it bad? Starry Sky…but it’s a masterclass in alliteration!
He thought logically for a while on the bed, planning in a notebook the perfect sequence of events necessary for him to have success. The title wasn’t the issue it was the content. He took up his tools and painted over the whole thing in black, a fresh canvas of broad brushstrokes, then began to work on his masterpiece. Forget the glow-in-the-dark gimmicks there wasn’t time for it, no time to delay the greatest painting of all time. The world needed it now!
The globe, but upside down so Antarctica was on top and not a single shade of blue or green on the planet. White seas with red continents and the entire planet wrapped in a blue toga. A Chinese-style snake-dragon arching like a soundwave, watching the planet with its mouth open the way witches watch children eating.
A week it took him. He had three meals in seven days, three cans of beans that is. Finally, with the best photos he could take, he uploaded it to his PaintPile. The caption read:
33 years in the making…from the universe to you, via this humble middleman…tips are welcome here (joking)
|Paintin Algorithmic Blues
And then he waited. He ate a pot noodle and drank a dusty bottle of wine he found under the bed. An hour, two. And then it came! A notification from PaintPile…somebody has commented on your post.
He went to the wardrobe and got into an old suit he’d worn to the funeral. He thought about his mother and he smiled. Finally here it was.
On the bed he took a deep breath and smiled and opened the comment. And it said this:
Pretentious
Three laughing-face reactions. He checked it was really on his post and it was…and so with a tear in his eye he fetched his hammer and chisel from under the bed and began chipping away at the wall, taking it down for good. After a couple of days he was still in his suit, still chipping, more wildly now, shaking the whole house with his hammering and ignoring the knocks at his door. He’d made a crater almost eight inches deep and even where the wall was not chipped the cracks ran the length of it, flirting with the ceiling. And this went on until one day the police broke the door down and took the emaciated artist away.
The landlord with his head in his hands stepped into the room after them. ‘My door,’ he said. ‘My walls!’
Kale paints in the hospital these days. The room is quiet and the sun cuts bright through the glass. Smiling ladies bring him tea and compliments, they see he’s well fed. But despite their constant sycophanting, nightly he plans to escape.