I wrote this for an art paper, it's part of the story --
This is just a brief bit of introduction to make what follows a little bit easier to comprehend. It is also an abridged catalog of problems - both aesthetic and technical - that I encountered.
Being a typical student, I, of course, put the writing of this work off to the very last possible instant, and am now interleaving this writing with studying for finals in another class. This is all very trivial and expected - it is not an excuse mind you, simply an insight into the artistic process. My sojourn to the Norton Simon museum took place on the last Saturday of the summer semester, and minor problems forced me to cut my stay there to approximately three hours, which is nowhere near sufficient time to absorb even a single wing of it.
My original intent was to contrast Madonna and Child portraits from different eras. Half way through the museum, I realized that there is not sufficient variety in this particular vein to make for what I thought might be an interesting discussion. I still thought the general concept was good, but. . . .
Then I saw a nude of Venus and Cupid. Aha, I thought, now there's a good contrast - primly draped Virgin and bored Christ child versus sensual goddess and playful sprite.
I was in a hurry. I didn't note the dates and artist on the Venus; I would simply grab a museum catalog and work from the plate at home. I picked up a catalog on my way out (a hardback - they had run out of paperbound volumes) and today when I look in it, I can't find her. The Venus must have been a new acquisition. Sigh. Despite this, I decided to stay as close to my original theme as I could.
In an act of astonishing laziness, I have decided to write my Art paper in such a manner that it would be possible for me to include it - with a minimum of revision - as a chapter in a novel that I'm in the process of writing. Thus, it is presented mostly as a dialogue between two characters who have recently become lovers. Any exposition that does not seem germane to the subject of post-Gothic Art may be safely considered superfluous for our purposes here, and so may be ignored.
I generally write essays in single-sitting, one-draft sessions in real time. Fiction is a lot more work. What follows should then address the subject at hand adequately (I hope!), but will probably seem a bit dry and barren as literature. Some of the syntactical structure may be awkward. The word choices may seem strange, the conversation staged. There may be some jargon that needs to be translated into the vernacular. It will be doctored and fleshed out later when I have greater leisure available.
I have had trouble picking artworks to discuss. I had considered an early Renaissance painting of a penitent saint and a Goya of the same man. I would call it dueling Sebastians. My heart wasn't in it. Oh well. I would go back to my first idea, a Madonna - but with a twist. I found a work that was similar in concept, but completely different in spirit. Later, I saw a more modern painting in a different style where the subject had the same face. In the course of the dialogue it will become clear which they were. There were more technically perfect pieces; there were paintings and sculptures I found more appealing; there was also stuff that made me feel a splash of sour bile in the back of my throat, stuff that made me fear for the children, made me ashamed for my species, and outraged that it had been given wallspace. . . . I felt, however, that writing about what I liked best or least would probably not be that interesting and certainly would teach me very little about art.
Most of the character descriptions shall be truncated or clipped out; the people are more interesting than they appear here. I don't want to be handing in eighty pages of copy to fulfill a two thousand word requirement. The female lead may use peculiar phraseology at times; this is intentional, meant to point up her Quebecois accent. Hopefully it will be rendered more convincingly and more subtle in the future. I don't consider this intro as part of my paper.
Um um, what else? There is a page of attributions appended to
this work. Some of it actually played a part in my research; some
of it is sheer fabrication. I leave it as an exercise for the
interested reader to determine which is which. If time permits,
I may include a brief synopsis of the larger work in order to make
what follows more palatable.
(**********************************************************)
From here out the intro is a bit of explanation of the larger work and can be safely skipped. It is now less than eighteen hours before this is due. Let me see. . . It is shaping up - I'm half way through page nine of the actual paper now - to be that this will constitute part of the middle third of a chapter about a quarter of the way through the novel that it shall become (maybe) part of. [Lorda' mercy, it about kills me to end a sentence with a preposition, but time is now too precious to allot to editing when the raw copy is at all understandable.] I feel that I'm about two thirds of the way through.
Uh. Uh. Well, the tense toggles between a standard simple past, which I think I've managed to preserve all the way through what follows, and a present and present progressive mix. The narrator has no name (at least not yet), and does not always look out through the eyes of the male lead in the following fragment. (S)he (or it?) is largely unpierced by time's arrow and does not necessarily experience events in a chronologically linear sequence.
My God, I sound like those twentieth century artists that I affect to disdain so. Maybe I picked the wrong artworks to discuss.
Please keep in mind that this is a rough draft (for the fourth summer in a row, I hereby swear that I shall never take a summer class again - there just isn't enough time to do good work). I will almost certainly not do any editing on a hard copy before I print the final version. Why am I typing all this here? I'm having severe misgivings about the wisdom of doing an "alternative" paper, and I'm trying to convince myself that it will be alright.