Robert Colquhoun (kolkoon) wrote in spinningcompass, @ 2014-10-24 23:11:00 |
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Entry tags: | !open, ~robert colquhoun |
Who? Colquhoun & OPEN
Where? Mitchell's
When? Friday Eve
What? Depressed sketching.
Open? Yes
Rating? Moderate... trigger warning for depression & alcoholism.
There were quite a few reasons not to be depressed. Being used to painting on old bits of cardboard, and often having to choose between eating and buying oil paints (the paint always winning), to be given the amount of material that Tony had acquired for him was like a dream come true. And the wine was free. And the food. And the people seemed decent enough.
But MacBryde wasn't there. And he had quickly realised, in a way that was simultaneously beautiful and horrific, that he would rather be impoverished, he would rather starve, he would rather have absolutely nothing and die in the gutter than be without his sweetheart. All of the fights seemed so trivial, now. He hadn't realised how right the critics had been. They were a single organism, and now he'd been cut in half.
Okay, maybe the wine was making him overreact slightly. It wasn't cheering him up, but he just kept drinking, drinking and sketching- sketching what he could actually see from where he was sitting had given way to following Jankel's advice that he paint from his imagination as opposed to observation.Except his imagination was a very disturbing place when he felt like this. Half-drunk, lonely, still haunted by the war, the image on the page grew darker, the figure growing sombre, the face distorted to a level of inhuman agony, pencil sketching lines over the mouth, the eyes wide and hollow and misplaced.