She painted a self-portrait of her holding a pizza. It was leaned against an easel on the furthest corner from the studio's entrance. The portrait was painted on a thick layer of canvas. In the first days, it was marked up loosely with deft strokes of light graphite, the checkered, the sleek curvature of the face, and those eyes. Her eyes shone like bright moonlight; the simple suggestion of its shape was enough for the imagination to fill in the blanks. They were exaggerated in the portrait, reproduced larger than real life, yet the look of an unreachable distance remained constant. Somehow, through the simple articulation of shape, she had perfectly encapsulated her creation in an asymptotic barrier that put all of my human efforts to shame.
My canvas was next to hers, a Bristol board piece of about the same size. I was drawing a portrait of my friend holding a cookie. This was a project centered around the idea of extreme foreshortening a portrait for our final exam. Because of the project’s proximity to the final, I did not doubt that this piece of art must have felt particularly academic to all the students working on it. I suspect that my classmates enlisted an inevitable emotional detachment from the work and instead opted for a more produreal approach to finishing this graded assignment.
Visual art was never my strong suit, and I had never invested the deluge of time and effort that was demanded to promise the quality of my work. However, perhaps I am being too harsh on myself since I had taken art classes for years at this point, and without noticing, I had almost found myself near the top of our school’s art program. Even still, I could never bring myself to call myself an artist. It just seemed to depreciate, so unearned. It felt like a spit in the face to artists who could actually paint, artists who became trailblazers for modern movements. I could never associate any isomer of my being with the likeness of the greats such as Claude Monet and Yoshimoto Nara.
A week had passed, her emptiness between her pencil lines had been filled with extraordinary colors and a vivid vitality. She started with her arm, which was holding out the pizza in front of her. Strokes of a bright pink are blended delicately with a natural orange to create her skin tone. A pale blue crept up in the shadows to draw out wonderful dimensions and contrast to the piece.
My piece had become an abomination. I made the fatal mistake of choosing charcoal, a medium with which I was unfamiliar, to add value to my piece. This misjudgment caused my piece to become a mess of blacks and whites; many parts of my portrait's face were too dark, and the rough edges of the shading made my friend look like a sneering ghoul that had just come back from the dead. That week was depressing; the academic boundary in which I, too, had constrained my piece to was shattered. My art had begun to seep into my emotions. My failed portrait became a strong current that took my wandering thoughts and commanded them back to my ineptitude. I could hear the scratches of charcoal screeching in the wind, I could see my portrait’s disembodied eyes staring back at me in the darkness of night.
During the hours upon hours I spent working on my portrait, I often heard gasps of amazement at the sheer beauty of the neighbouring piece. Students from higher art classes stopped dead in their tracks to reel in admiration of what she had created, they would give compliment after compliment to her until she became tired of hearing them. Those same students walked past my portrait with a passing, judging glance and proceeded to make for the tray of erasers that was next to my easel.
I could not accept my failures, I could not accept this condemnation of my friend upon a work of my own creation. But most of all, I admired her. I could not accept my own admiration towards the girl’s work. Her excellence, her mastery, her individuality danced about her canvas in a careless and offensive jubilation which gripped me with dissatisfaction.
Several weeks had passed, and we were upon our final day of the exams. We were to work on our projects for one final class and promptly submit all material and complete this piece. The flooring beneath my easel seemed to have been assaulted by a vicious rubber rain, a reminder of the amelioration of my mistake from a week before. Charcoal pencils snapped in half, lay next to a set of graphite pencils. An obliterated gum eraser was scattered about my desk, which had been stained into a chromatic grey from the values on my finished project. I waged a war against my art piece for just shy of a week. Hours upon hours of each day, repeated again and again, sacrificed to ensure the victory of my project. I had won; my project was complete. It was detailed and shaded correctly, it may even have been beautiful. A few feet beside me stood her project, still unfinished, her eyes still hollow outlines of light graphite, instead of that sinister paint which caused me so much torment. It felt good, the pain on my back from my hunched position shading the piece, the near-black skin on the side of my palm. My neglected courses of my other final exams. They were worthy sacrifices. Or were they?
With admiration comes envy, with envy comes obsession, and with obsession comes self-destruction, with a side effect of greatness. Her painting was still beautiful; it was flawed and unfinished. My drawing will never be beautiful, how every stroke of my pencil seems misplaced, how the mistakes glare back at me like gargoyles upon every inspection of my creation. Her painting with the pizza will always be better because of a poisonous and unattainable and divine individuality that I will never emulate. Her brushstrokes will always be perfect, even when they are placed in perfect discordance.
I am forever trapped within the confines of my individuality. That feeling of admiration, long surpassed by our persistent though inconsequential efforts, will be eclipsed by another work ever in my life.