Canvas Spirits MP3
Read by Patsy Prince & Silas Hawkins
Note: sadly the damn video camera didn't capture the first two sections of the story, which are reproduced below for your reading pleasure. The video picks up at section 3, where it appears embdded below.
When I first saw her across the gallery she was a blob. A dash of black. Not even a stick. A person definitely, but only a blob below a line that led her along. She was the young child of a stick person in an L S Lowry industrial scene. A mere crowd extra. ‘Snowing In Leeds’ it was called, all brick patterns on townscape contours, spiralling smoke and chimneys, hundreds of people. So many blobs, but I studied them all, each one a potential spirit of life and love, however small.
I was already a solo spirit by then, resident in a Joseph Wright composition of the philanthropist Brooke Boothby. One gloved hand on a volume of Rousseau, the other nestling my chin as I engaged the viewer in philosophical contemplation. I was lying amongst fallen leaves in a wood. Very strange when I think about it. Elegant hat though.
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I was sick of being a stick, after I made it up from being a blob. Stick dog, stick child, stick adult. And it's colder without clothes, especially if you don't have a body with anything to show.
I envied Mister. We all did. More than refined, there was something dashing about him. I knew he spotted me because I fidgeted a lot. I so longed to leave home.
I wanted dimension. I wanted breasts. Buttocks particularly. I aspired to have shape. Any shape. Yet I had to wait.
My break came with an Italian student. He came up close to look at my brush strokes and considered what he saw. He held me in his mind as he sauntered towards a Whistler, ‘Harmony In Lilac & Turquoise: A Young Girl’. I jumped. There was a vacancy there. Now I could fill out and smile in a silk dress, a Japanese fan held open in my hand. There was just one more essential accessory I needed: a name. I decided on Whistler's signature motif. I would be called Butterfly.