There was once a painter who kept his finest colours locked away.
Not out of greed. Out of care. He was saving them for the great picture, the one he would paint when there was time. And there was never time. He built a house with his own hands. He raised his children. He sat up through the nights beside his wife when she fell ill. He hid his savings from strangers and mended the roof before the rains. The box of colours waited on the highest shelf, and he told it, every year: soon.
Then one spring night the house was quiet, the children were grown, and the three old cherry trees in his garden burst into bloom all at once, as they do for barely ten days a year. He knew it was time.
He put on his old painter's hood. He fitted the brass claws he had made long ago, when his own fingers began to stiffen. He set up the easel beneath the blossom, primed the canvas, and stood before it as straight as a young man, proud, impatient, ready to let loose a storm of colour that had been waiting half a lifetime.
He opened the box.
The colours were gone. Not stolen. Dried. The fairy tale he had been keeping in those little tubes had turned to dust while he was busy living. The bristles fell from his brush at the first touch. The oil had long since seeped away. Only one thing was left that would still go onto a palette, and it was black.
So he stands there now, in the middle of the brightest night of the year. Blue smoke on one side, a fire like a sunset on the other, the blossom glowing above his head. All the colour in the world is around him, and none of it is his. His hands still want. His eyes already know. On the easel, the words he once painted as a boy, when he still believed them: art needs no rules.
It needs only one thing: that you do not wait.
The figure was built by hand: a mask hidden in a silk hood, mechanical claws, a brush and a palette, beneath the flowering cherries of the artist's garden.
The story was inspired by the song "Artist" by Dolphin, from the album "Depth of Field", 1999.
(Fine Art Photography. Created in May 2023.)
