A Year of Stories (Collection Two)

Flesh and Ink and Beating Hearts

"And what do your eyes see right now?"

"A woman who hates what she has become."

There is something about the flesh that has always drawn me in a way that no other medium ever could. It's how it shapes the image, I think, the way it adds its own tone and contrast, the way it moves.

On flesh, no idea ever truly survives the first press of the pen. The skin takes the ink, but it gives something in return, it becomes a part of the conversation between the artist and the art.

In the end – the skin, the flesh – always wins, and you discover that it was never your job to create art, but merely to expose it, to guide it to some final form.

"And what do you know about it?"

"Only what they tell me, only what I can see."

"Perfect...And here I thought you were normal, so what, are you a part of a cult something?"

"I'm not a part of any cult."

"Pardon me, a 'movement'... You know what, whatever, I'm not here to judge, I'm here to draw."

"Don't you ever get tired?"

"Of drawing? No. Of listening to people like you, a little bit. So why don't you make things easier on us both, and tell me what you want."

"What if I told you I wanted a tribal armband?"

"I'd tell you to get out. If you've heard anything about me, you know that's not how I work."

"Then enlighten me, how do you work?"

"You tell me what you think you want, I start drawing, in a couple of hours we see where we land."

"And how do you know I'll like 'where we land?' Wouldn't it just be safer to draw what I ask you too?"

"If you wanted that, you wouldn't be here, now would you?"

They started calling me The Artist about a year ago.

One afternoon, I was working on a mandala for a client. They're pretty popular, probably because they come out nicely most of the time, and they make you feel like you have a complex soul.

As my hand walked through the geometries I'd sketched a thousand times previous, I felt the tug of the flesh, felt it more strongly, more profoundly, than I ever had before.

Don't ask me why, but this time I allowed that tug to take over, allowed it to guide my hand. In the end, the mandala was transformed into something else, something ... more.