Art without soul

“If I could say it in words, there would be no reason to paint.” – Edward Hopper

Oil paint is an obedient dog, and watercolour? Watercolour is a cat that has slinked in from the rain, found its food bowl empty, and discovered you sitting on its favourite couch. It never goes easy on you. Watercolour is either too intense or too dilute, it is translucent, so you can’t hide your mistakes under a layer of paint, and worst of all, it fights you every step of the way. Oil paint stays where it is meant to, but watercolour—it flows. All you can do is direct it, but ultimately watercolour goes where it wants.

Amitha liked that about watercolour. She felt a kinship with a medium that, like her, followed its own path. Her parents called her stubborn, but she saw herself as strong-willed. Her parents wanted her to study medicine, be a surgeon like her father, but Amitha chose art. No pets they said, so she volunteered at an animal shelter. They cut off her allowance, but she got herself a job at a mouldering old stationery store and paid her way through art school. Her friends told her that there was no money in art any more. “Anyone can create art using generative AI these days” they said, but Amitha was adamant. “AI can suck on the pointy end of my Number 7 brush!” she said. “My Art has soul.”

As run down as it seemed, Vinayaka Stationery Mart, where Amitha worked, supplied art material to the finest art schools in Bangalore, but you could be forgiven for never knowing it existed. It was housed in a century-old building in the by lanes of Bangalore’s Old Majestic area, tiny on the outside, but absolutely massive once you walked in the door. The store had a small reception area. A door set in the back led to a dark warehouse the size of a football field. Weak bulbs lit each aisle, and though Amitha had worked here for close to six months, she still found aisles she hadn’t visited before.

So it came as no surprise when she found herself crawling through a new and particularly dusty aisle one day, looking for speciality art paper, a speckled variety that a customer had requested. Mr.Hanumatha, the fatherly proprietor of the store, kept the art paper on the bottom shelves, and as she sorted through the piles, something underneath the shelf caught her eye. Something metallic, buried in decades old dust. She rolled up her sleeves, fished it out and cleaned it on the hem of her kurta.

It was an old watercolour box. The kind that painters used in the early 1900s. It was made of tin, the maker’s mark faded. It was at least a 100 years old, so she didn’t expect her jaw to drop the way it did when she opened it. The pans of paint inside—two neat rows of 24 colours—still looked as creamy and fresh as the day they were squeezed in.

No one in the store even recognised the old watercolour box and Mr.Hanumantha was happy to let her have it. Amitha couldn’t believe her luck, and she waited all day to get home so she could try them out.

That evening, she painted a watercolour butterfly perched on the branches of a lantena bush. The paints in the box were unlike anything she had encountered before, smooth as butter and translucent with a shimmery glow. As she added a finishing touch of ultramarine blue to the butterfly’s wing, her phone pinged. She glanced at it, when she looked back to her painting, the butterfly was gone, and so was the branch of lantena. She stared at the painting, wondering if she had really painted the scene, but a movement caught her eye. There in the corner of her room, gently clapping its wings was the butterfly she had painted, a Blue Mormon, iridescent blue framing the white on it’s hind-wing, and lying at her feet was a branch of lantena with its delicate pink and yellow flowers.

She didn’t dare believe it. She painted another, and then, two more. When the early light of dawn filtered through her curtains, her room was filled with butterflies, and the suffused fragrance of flowers.

She should have stopped there, but she didn’t. She couldn’t stop painting. The subjects in her paintings changed. She painted a cup of steaming hot coffee, and had to grab it before it fell off the painting. She painted a bag, and at the very last second decided to turn it into a Louis-Vuitton. She carried the bag with her and enjoyed every minute her friends spent staring at it.

She painted a car, a Bentley no less, but it remained true to size, a faithfully reproduced Bentley Mulsanne, the size of a toy. So, she painted a diamond necklace, hocked it at a shady jewellery store and bought herself an actual car. Her friends noticed her change in behaviour, but Amitha didn’t care. She dressed like she was attending a gala every day, spent money like there was no tomorrow. She cared for no one but herself. She had magic paint, and the world was beneath her notice.

It couldn’t last. One day she opened her paint box, and there was only a dribble left. A little bit of cadmium yellow, and a touch of ochre. “How poetic” she thought, “just enough to paint a last golden egg.”

She quit her job at the old stationery store and no longer returned calls from the animal shelter she volunteered at. One day, the watchman in her building told her that she had run over a puppy as she parked her car. “Good!” She snarled. “Strays should be culled.”

She didn’t paint any more, so her friends were surprised when she sent them an invitation to her Art exhibit. “This is different from what you usually do,” said a friend. “Did you paint these in watercolour?”

“Fuck watercolour,” Amitha growled, “These are all AI generated.”

Notes

Write Club’s theme for this week was Flavourful writing. We were offered two story-prompts. The one I picked was this: “A struggling artist discovers her paintings are coming to life, but each one takes a piece of her soul.” I guess my essay on coming to terms with Gen AI was still on my mind when I decided on the story.

Last week, at Write Club, I tried my hand at writing horror.