Mara walked down the hallway, past a few night-owls wandering, looking monumentally distratced. She was looking for a place to spread out her makeshift canvas. Finally, she settled on the floor of the main room, where the soft thrumming seemed the loudest anyway.
She laid out every color she had available, be it pencils or pastels or watercolor or gouache; filled her water-tin from the bathroom tap; readied her brushes. She took her entire pad of Bristol board out and glued three sheets together per panel, then laid the panels out in a square--nine in all. As they dried, she stared down at the white expanse, breathing deeply. She didn't know how much time it would take before she came up for air again.
A blue wash first--pale stormcloud blue, patterned like light underwater but more complex; she saw hints of the Tardis's strutwork in it, even before she started laying in details. Trance was already taking her. Her mind was falling into the painting, into the process; even as her mind tumbled complex bits of psychic information inside it and tried to translate them into a 2-D medium, a strange serenity was rising up inside her.
The girl, first. The granddaughter's face and form, near-photographic, surfaced slowly from the blue in the center of the painting; it played peek-a-boo inside soft streaks of gold and silver mist that seemed to be made up of letters and numbers Mara couldn't read. The hypercomplex patterns she had seen within the Tardis during her first attack were back again, but more manageable. /Clotho's threads,/ she thought, and again did not know what was meant by that.
Other people--the Doctor, Rose, hints of a few others. She laid them in in pale nimbii of green and royal and amber, like spirits attending his granddaughter. The lines of light/energy/words/equations wove around the lot of them, dancing in patterns so complex she could barely represent them. The girl's heart was at the center of them, weaving the threads of all the others into a pattern that she obsessed over alone for...she didn't even know. Over an hour, certainly. It seemed to be the most important part of everything.
No burning worlds here. No sunflowers. The past was dead; the promises of the future were what needed to be shown. That and the admonishment to seize them fully, before his refusal to live meant that his granddaughter did not get to.
She knew the end result was beautiful; she knew it was more complex than anything she'd ever done; she knew she'd spent most of the night on it, so it damn well /should/ be good by now. When she hit the wall at six-plus hours and found herself so stiff and aching from kneeling on the floor that it took her a minute of painful effort to straighten...she knew she had to be done. /Please let me be done, and have done this right./
She started picking up her things, carefully wiping the floor free of any traces of pigment. She'd sprayed the panels with fixative; her work here was done and she was so tired she wanted to cry. She had more smudges on her nose, her arms were multicolored up to the elbows. /What am I gonna do when I run out of art supplies?/
She stretched tentatively, alarmed by several very loud and almost painful pops. "Ow. Ow. Ow."
Then realized she wasn't alone. As in.../multiply/ wasn't alone. And she didn't know how long they had been standing there.
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timeasmymeasure
[Mara] Jackson Pollock-style Paintfest (tag open)
Date: 2006-04-18 08:49 pm (UTC)She laid out every color she had available, be it pencils or pastels or watercolor or gouache; filled her water-tin from the bathroom tap; readied her brushes. She took her entire pad of Bristol board out and glued three sheets together per panel, then laid the panels out in a square--nine in all. As they dried, she stared down at the white expanse, breathing deeply. She didn't know how much time it would take before she came up for air again.
A blue wash first--pale stormcloud blue, patterned like light underwater but more complex; she saw hints of the Tardis's strutwork in it, even before she started laying in details. Trance was already taking her. Her mind was falling into the painting, into the process; even as her mind tumbled complex bits of psychic information inside it and tried to translate them into a 2-D medium, a strange serenity was rising up inside her.
The girl, first. The granddaughter's face and form, near-photographic, surfaced slowly from the blue in the center of the painting; it played peek-a-boo inside soft streaks of gold and silver mist that seemed to be made up of letters and numbers Mara couldn't read. The hypercomplex patterns she had seen within the Tardis during her first attack were back again, but more manageable. /Clotho's threads,/ she thought, and again did not know what was meant by that.
Other people--the Doctor, Rose, hints of a few others. She laid them in in pale nimbii of green and royal and amber, like spirits attending his granddaughter. The lines of light/energy/words/equations wove around the lot of them, dancing in patterns so complex she could barely represent them. The girl's heart was at the center of them, weaving the threads of all the others into a pattern that she obsessed over alone for...she didn't even know. Over an hour, certainly. It seemed to be the most important part of everything.
No burning worlds here. No sunflowers. The past was dead; the promises of the future were what needed to be shown. That and the admonishment to seize them fully, before his refusal to live meant that his granddaughter did not get to.
She knew the end result was beautiful; she knew it was more complex than anything she'd ever done; she knew she'd spent most of the night on it, so it damn well /should/ be good by now. When she hit the wall at six-plus hours and found herself so stiff and aching from kneeling on the floor that it took her a minute of painful effort to straighten...she knew she had to be done. /Please let me be done, and have done this right./
She started picking up her things, carefully wiping the floor free of any traces of pigment. She'd sprayed the panels with fixative; her work here was done and she was so tired she wanted to cry. She had more smudges on her nose, her arms were multicolored up to the elbows. /What am I gonna do when I run out of art supplies?/
She stretched tentatively, alarmed by several very loud and almost painful pops. "Ow. Ow. Ow."
Then realized she wasn't alone. As in.../multiply/ wasn't alone. And she didn't know how long they had been standing there.