ArchivedLogs:Art, Flesh, and Bones

Art, Flesh, and Bones
Dramatis Personae Rasa, Sebastian
In Absentia	2013-01-18 '
Location <XS> Art Room - FL2
Smells of paints and chalks and turpentine mingle freely in this room, well-used, well-stocked. Natural light flows in, plentiful through the large windows. The long counter-like tables are speckled with spots of color, and half finished projects often stand on easels or propped in corners. The many cupboards lining the walls are crammed full of art supplies. Afternoon extracurriculars find Rasa in the art room, seated at a table with a large drawing board wedged against hir abdomen. One arm braces the board against the edge of the table and the other hand holds a grease pencil. As of yet, the teen has yet to draw anything. Ze is decked out in loose fitting jeans and a hooded sweatshirt, the glove on the left hand removed to better grip the pencil ze holds. Hir face, while quite a bit more exposed, is still half draped in transparent embroidered cloth, stretched between ears and resting halfway up the bridge of hir nose. For once, dark hair cascades down hir shoulders instead of being hidden in hir hood. Ze hums a little and stares at the paper, but still, there's no movement, no drawing. The door cracks open, and Sebastian slips inside, a large plastic toolbox tucked under his arm. He hesitates when he sees someone else in the room, offering Rasa a warm closed-lipped smile. "You draw?" He doesn't move to peek /at/ the drawing board, though he does move closer to take a spot around the corner at an adjacent table, setting his toolbox down on top. "My pa's always trying to teach me but I'm not the greatest at it." "Maybe. A bit," Rasa admits, turning to look over hir shoulder, head tilting to one side as she takes in Sebastian. "I don't practice much and mean to. Someone reminded me of it the other day." Ze shuffles in hir seat as ze turns. "What do you keep in there? Art stuff?" 'Obviously...' trickles across hir forehead, half hidden by hir mop of hair. "You gonna take any art classes here?" Sebastian wants to know, swivelling absently back and forth on his stool. "My pa teaches one," he adds with a smile, "Color and Light, but it's only available one semester a year. What kind of things do you draw?" He crinkles his nose at the toolbox, looking downwards a little sheepishly. "Um. Yeah, I guess it's -- it's not very /traditional/," he hedges awkwardly. "Oh, um, trees and plants, I guess." Rasa remarks, sliding the board onto the table and moving to stand up. "Your family... is close with the school then. You, your brother, your dad?" Ze bites hir lip as ze draws closer to look at the tool box. "I wouldn't worry about tradition. I am not sure any of us are very well defined by that category." "My pa graduated from here a few years back," Sebastian explains, shrugging a shoulder. He slips out of his seat, going to get a black square of poster paper from a cabinet, as well as a hot glue gun. He doesn't turn it on, though. He just sets it beside the paper, biting down on his lip before opening the tool box. Which, upon inspection, turns out to be full of bones. Large ones, in the bottom, smaller more delicate ones in the upper tray. A wealth of them, in many different sizes, all clean and bare white. "You like plants? Or just like to draw them? There's a plantguy," he says, musing, "out in the forest. Or was." "Jim. I met him. Liked his bark." Rasa's face takes on the colors of tree bark just then, but retains its smoothness. "May I?" ze gestures toward the bones, fingers hovering over some of the smaller ones. "I like plants okay. I just spent a lot of time with them before moving here and kind of considered them my friends. It's a little strange... meeting someone who was like a living hydroponic." The bark fades, but images of ivy starts to grow across hir visible skin. "Was he nice? My brother keeps threatening to eat him. I don't think our teeth are really made for plants. Sure," Sebastian relaxes a little when Rasa reaches to the bones, smiling. "I hunted them all myself," he confides, a little shy as he takes his seat again, and then, "That's really pretty. Do plants make good friends? They seem -- patient." "They listen well, but you have to be careful what you say to them. Sure, they'll hear the bad just fine, but if all you tell them are your saddest thoughts and worst feelings, they start to yellow and pale and die." Rasa looks down at hir hand and at the ivy that is starting to do what ze says. Hir lips pull down in a frown as her skin takes on a faintly bronze hue, the green disappearing beneath it. "Thank you. It was called my art the other day, but I can't control it... and I can't replicate it with my fingers and a pencil yet." Ze picks up a long delicate bone and lets both gloved and ungloved hand hold it. "You've done a nice job with the bones. They're so smooth." "Really?" Sebastian's eyes widen. "Oh, gosh. I wouldn't want to kill them. I play mine songs at home, but I don't think I'm really, uh, that good. But they're /cheerful/ songs usually, do you think that helps? Are you good at plants?" He plucks a set of bones from the box, small and stubby to lay them out on his paper. "There's beetles that will eat them clean for you. A lot of museums are only too happy to lend out their colonies, they need to get fed somehow and museums don't have bodies coming in /every/ week. Do you want that to be your art?" He gestures to the drawing board that Rasa left on the table. "Playing them songs is probably really helpful. I'm not musical. I haven't tried that." Rasa's bronzish sheen remaines in place as ze starts to pick out other bones to examine. Ze glances toward the tablet when Sebastian gestures to it. "Oh. I don't know. The teacher said we could start with a survey, you know, to get to know what things would be nice. Maybe something will stick out later. Pencils and paper, they're just... well, kind of the most accessible. What do you do with the bones?" "Oh. That's cool. I like when classes have some flexibility to them." Sebastian is picking smaller bones, now, slim and curved and pointed. His nails extend, carefully digging at a side of one of the first bones to further hollow out a notch in its side. "I --" He frowns slightly. "I -- build things," he says, slowly. "I like things with color. Though I guess there's pencils with color, too. Maybe instead of just plants you could draw plantguy. Jim. That's like plants /and/ a portrait, right?" "Maybe," Rasa accepts this. "But a plant is a plant and plants are easy. If I draw a leaf, it looks like a leaf, right? Or if I draw some squiggly lines in a group and then some straight up and down fashion and draw a line underneath, it's recognizable as a tree." Ze grabs a stool and settles onto it, allowing hirself to sort of dig through Sebastian's bones, albeit carefully. "People - they are so much more complex. I don't even know how to draw a nose. It doesn't have lines. Just holes and bumps." Sebastian considers this, reaching webbed fingers to brush at his own nose. "Isn't everything lines?" He sounds a little confused, and prods at his nose further. "I can't draw noses either, though," he confides. "Or hands. Plants seem kind of intricate too, though. I mean you could draw a /generic/ person, right, or a /generic/ plant, but what if you want your witch hazel to actually look like witch hazel? Then you need to be careful with your knobs and bumps." He's looking back to his bones, continuing to carefully notch them and fit them together. "You haven't seen my blurry landscapes then." Rasa points out with a smile. Hir skin tones grow less metallic as ze tries to balance three different bones into a pyramid of sorts. "Maybe I'm just an impressionist a hundred years too late." The small structure shifts and collapses. Rasa idly tries again. "You might be looking at the problem too closely. Or I am. I really can't put my finger on what is going on with noses. The more lines I try, the less real they look." Ze glances at what Sebastian is fitting together. "Do you know what that will look like when it's done?" Sebastian's smile curls quick again, warm and amused. "Naw, don't say you're a hundred years too late," he says lightly, "just say you're retro. Or. Paying homage. Maybe you could just try a style," he adds, "where everyone doesn't have noses. It could be your /thing/. Your take on people-faces." His teeth press against his lip, and he nods. "When it's done it'll be Ghulheim. That's a ghoul-city. The last thing I built was prettier than ghoul-city but this definitely feels like it's going to be ghoulish." "Feels? You are an artist." Rasa pinkens in the cheeks like someone has airbrushed rose upon them. Ze smiles as well and starts stacking bones like Lincoln Logs. "I could. Maybe. I"m kind of overwhelmed though, by options." Ze instead leans hir elbows on the tabletop and leans forward, watching. "Maybe I'll just start finger painting - really get my hands messy." "Me? I just kill things." Sebastian's cheeks color darker, too, but he smiles at Rasa, glancing sideways towards hir as he works on his burgeoning sculpture. "Nothing wrong with mess. My hands usually get messy -- er. Long before I'm actually sitting down to /art/ this. But art can be mostly anything you want, really. There's nothing wrong with finger painting. Probably actually getting your hands in it gives you a whole new take on interacting with your medium." "You don't seem the type to just kill things for the sake of killing things," Rasa muses, letting out a long breath. "Seems to me, you're just finding use for everything. Nothing going to waste." Ze straightens up and turns around, moving to grab hir sketch pad and bring it back to the table. "You work. I'll draw lines. Maybe they'll be you. Maybe they'll just be the movements you make and look nothing like you." "No. I mean, yes. I mean, these --" Sebastian gestures to the bones. "They're all things we ate. It seems better than throwing them away." He hooks his sneakers behind a rung of the stool, momentarily looking over to Rasa, and back to his bones. The slim ribs protruding upwards form a base, now, a wide and rather erratically shapen one, its angles a little jarringly off-kilter. "Me, impressionist-style? Neat. I'll be interested to see how it turns out. I've never made a person out of -- you'd think bones would be a good medium for that, right?" His nose crinkles. "Then again, making a person out of fish and bird and squirrel bones might be a kind of impressionism anyway. Maybe I'll make you later." Rasa chuckles warmly, darkness disappearing from hir from, so much so that even hir hair lightens a few shades at a time. "Oh, that would be interesting. For some reason, I'm imagining a portrait done out of noodles." Hir hand makes wide sweeping motions over the page, eyes mostly locked on Sebastian, veering away when the tip of the pencil spends too much time away from the surface of the paper. Ze corrects the placement and continues. "I suppose it's because noodles are a bit smooth, like bones. But bones'd be better, on account of not looking like something a kid did in art class." Never mind that's pretty much where they are. "You could make some pretty things out of noodles," Sebastian muses, thoughtfully, his attention now turned fully to his sculpture as he carefully notches one slim delicate bone into another. "Some macaroni, some farfalle, some rigatoni -- is there round pasta? Mmm. You could make an angel. Paint it. It'd be neat. We /are/ kids in art class," he adds with a quicker smile. "I don't know what noodles I'd use for you. Is it bad I can picture the bones easier? I don't eat noodles much." "You picture me in the medium you're most comfortable in," Rasa decides, pausing hir movements for a while to stare at the lines on hir page. "I think there are wagon wheel things - even if I don't know the correct Italian term for them." Fingers scratch at the back of hir neck through the wavy lengths of light brown hair. "What do you like to eat?" Sebastian glances over, peeking at the lines on Rasa's page, as well, and then getting back to work. "Oh, there /are/. Um. I don't know which ones those are, we never have the wheely things in the house. They could be a head, though. Funny head with a nose right in the center -- or maybe that's a mouth. It'd be a creepy mouth, though. Not," he allows, "that I have much room to talk about creepy mouths. I guess I'm comfortable with the bones. Where are /you/ comfortable?" Her question earns a slightly darker flush, a shrug of one shoulder. "I mean, I, uh, there's a lot I /like/ to eat but I mostly -- just eat -- a lot of meat. Shane and I hunt. Fish. When we've got time. Otherwise the kitchen keeps us stocked in chicken and steaks and pork. What about you? People say the cooking's really good here." "Sometimes, I'm a squirrel and all I eat are nuts," Rasa shrugs and tilts the page so Sebastian can see better. The shape of his arm has been drawn and redrawn many times, overlaying the last, looking a little bit reminiscent of Duchamps Nudes. There is definitely less color, but hir thumb has started to smear the greasy lines into a little more gray. "I'm... barely comfortable. I'm trying though, really, really trying. I'm out of the burqa, at least." "I see that," Sebastian says, sounding pleased about this, "do you feel okay about that? Hopefully people have been alright. I don't expect it's easy straight off." His smile widens at the picture. "Cool. It's like arm-in-stereo. Oh gosh. I eat squirrels." Maybe hir first words have only just sunk in. "But not you. Only the little furry kind. Er. Sorry. Um. Nuts are good." His head ducks sheepishly. Rasa coughs a bit, eyes wide at Sebastian's remark. Hir face blushes a soft pink, the color spreading over hir entire head before fading away until only the tips of hir hair are pink. "Don't worry. I wouldn't suspect you of eating people, even if they have squirrel like habits." Ze clears hir throat and ze sits up a little straighter. "It's weird. Sometimes my clothes are tight and it feels uncomfortable. Other times, I feel so strange having people see my limbs and the way I fidget." Ze purses hir lips and bows hir head a little. "I'm... okay, I think. I don't know if people recognize that I'm the same person, so no one says anything." "I recognized you," Sebastian says easily. "I just, I mean maybe it'd be weird to come in and be like I see you have changed your clothing! before I said hi or see how you're doing, you know? I know that'd make /me/ self-conscious as heck anyway. Asking about your art seemed relevant. Sometimes art's important to people." He shrugs a shoulder. "Think you'll stick with it?" "It's very relaxing," Rasa admits, scrubbing at the drawing with the interior knuckle of hir thumb to produce more gray smears. "I'll stick with it for that reason. Professor Xavier also says it might help to have me focus my creative side - instead of letting it wild across my body." Ze gnaws on hir lip before starting to add more lines, looking up at Sebastian. "I appreciate your sensitivity." "It's good to have an outlet," Sebastian agrees, smiling to himself for a brief moment before the smile fades into a look of concentration. His claws have extended further, thin sharp points carefully etching at bone with small scratching noises. "S'why I --" He trails off, brow furrowing and his gills briefly flaring and then flattening again. "It's probaby important," he says instead. "To learn -- not to be so wild." At the corners of his lips there is a faint twitch. "Unless it's when /you/ want to be." Rasa nods solemnly to Sebastian's statements. "Yeah. It should probably be because when I want it to be." Ze nods once more and likewise gets distracted by hir work. Art is demanding after all.