Chapter 4 : Art Thrives from Chaos

Dawn’s POV

I had never felt so confused in my entire life.

I continued to stare at the image of the woman made of metal in front of me. She seemed so familiar to me, her hair length identical to mine, and for some reason even the way her face and body was shaped made me feel like—

What was I thinking? Where did this sudden nonsense come from that I thought he had made a metal figure of me?

Snap out of it Dawn, you’re embarrassing yourself!

“It’s rushed,” he said in response to my question, despite me already having figured out that it was him who had created it.

“I like it,” I found myself admitting truthfully. “It doesn’t look rushed to me.”

“There are unpolished pieces on the woman’s figure, and the wolf’s eyes—”

“The wolf’s eyes are bearing down.” I breathed out before he could say anything. “Animate, claiming. It’s extraordinary how… human they look.”

I blinked as I came to realize I had been rambling, and my eyes shot up to look at Craig to see that he had already turned his head to stare down at me. I felt my face flush and become warm, and I averted my gaze from him in an attempt to save some of my dignity, at least.

In the past few hours alone, I had come to understand so much more about this man standing before me than I had ever hoped to.

It seemed like the more layers I pulled back about him the more layers there were to see. Exactly who was this man, and why did I want to continuously pull back his layers?

“Is that one yours?” he asked as he motioned to a porcelain carving. I didn’t need to look at what he was motioning to in order to know that he was looking at my piece. It was right next to his.

It was like a child to me, something I couldn’t take my focus away from and I felt acutely aware of every single gaze upon it. I nodded my head and found myself moving sideways along with him as we turned towards it.

“It’s fairly plain,” I admitted, finding myself berating my piece the same way he had done his.

“It’s authentic to you,” he shot back and I gnawed on my bottom lip to stop the protest from leaking out. The last thing I wanted to do was sound like I was fishing for compliments, and so instead I could only cast a critical look at the piece I had selected for them to show.

It was an unoriginal piece, and not one of my best. But Craig was right, at least, about this one being original to me. I had never created something in this genre before, usually my pieces focused on themes brighter than this; first loves, last loves, lasting loves. This one was…

“Love Carried Off,” he murmured beside me as he read the title I had given the piece. “Why that name?”

I stared at the piece in front of us. The image of a child in the embrace of her parents stared back at me, the porcelain thick and clean on the image of the child. But for the parents, instead of a full body of a man and woman, only the front half of their bodies remained solid as the back seemed to melt away, giving the effect similar to a burning candle.

The intention was to emphasize that they had slipped away from the child’s grasp.

“It seemed fitting,” I confessed. “Holding on to a love despite being dragged somewhere far, somewhere away.”

There was a lump in my throat I refused to swallow down.

“It…” he began, contemplating his next words. I shook my head as I turned to him.

“You don’t have to say anyth—”

“It looks like abandonment hopeful.”

My mouth fell open as I heard him say his next words, too stunned to speak or say anything in response. Suddenly, I felt the heart muscles in my chest tighten, and it was so loud and rattling to my ears that it replaced the thickness in my throat with the thin, fiery taste of understanding—of being understood. Setting both my head and heart ablaze.

And suddenly I was wholly aware of Craig in that moment, wholly aware of every atom of space he commanded with his presence alone. From the side of my eye I could even tell how much taller he was than me, looming over me like a shadow, a cloud, something greater than I was and could ever think to be, for a moment, he seemed more than human.

Craig was silent after his first initial thought of my piece, and I watched him as he inspected it and thought over the words he had said. Like he was analyzing my piece with the most softest of genius. I shifted from left foot to right foot as I waited for him to speak again, ready to hang onto every word he gave me. The dynamic between us was… something I had never experienced before. Something new. Something exciting.

“This looks like what I imagined if being abandoned held hope. You must have felt the loss over and over again, while making it, no?” he asked.

I turned away from him as I swallowed, and I didn’t say anything for some time after. I tried to remember if there was a time I had told him about losing my parents, if that was even a topic that had come up during our brief interaction freshman year. But I came up with nothing.

I shifted my feet. “”Why did I never see you in class?” I chose to ask in that moment, the thought wandering around in my head since I had learned he was in the art program.

Craig seemed to accept the sudden change in topic, “I took night classes, during the day I was too busy with work to attend. Probably why we never saw each other.”

I nodded my head in understanding, finally realizing why I had never seen him. “I’m sorry about—”

The sound of my apology was cut off when a loud pop infiltrated the air, and all the heads in the room turned to a woman holding a bottle of champagne in her hands as she popped the drink and began pouring for everyone.

They seemed to be celebrating something in the other corner of the room, and I felt Craig’s hand on my elbow as he leaned down towards me.

“Do you want to go stand outside?” I didn’t question his offer as I nodded my head without a second thought, quickly becoming overwhelmed with the amount of people in the room. I led as he followed towards the front door.

We found ourselves back at the front of the gallery, outside on the lawn. I looked out towards the bright sunset for a moment, the red and purple hues illuminated the sky so spectacularly that it seemed, just for a moment, the sky was illustrating its own art for the exhibition this evening. It took my breath away for a moment, and I felt the warm embrace of the late summer evening encase me.

“So, you haven’t left yet.” Craig broke the silence that had surrounded us, and I turned my head back to him to look at him as he spoke. “You think we can work together?”

It took me a moment to respond to him, too awe struck by the way the sun had hit him just perfectly in that moment to think about anything else. The sun lit up his amber eyes, making them seem to… glow. I found myself remembering something else in that moment, something about the way he had looked when he had saved me from those attackers in the alleyway.

His eyes had glowed then, too, but I couldn’t for the life of me seem to remember if there had been any sunlight streaking in to cause that effect. I turned away from him as I shook my head—I was losing my mind. What was I even thinking about right now?

I walked forward and found him following me onto the lawn in front of the gallery, we moved through it slowly and came upon a bench where Craig took a seat, his eyes never leaving me as he considered my movements. I gnawed on my bottom lip as I thought about what to say to him.

It was hard swallowing my ego, I would admit that, but only in this situation. I didn’t want to bring up the fact that we had met before, I didn’t want it to seem like I was begging for him to remember our chance fling. If we were going to work together, I wanted him to take me seriously as an artist and as a partner in this competition, not as someone he blew off for God knows what reason.

“I’m not sure I can work with your art style,” I confessed honestly, deciding to go the truthful route so that we could figure this out together.

I looked at Craig as I admitted this and noticed as he cocked his head in confusion.

“You said you liked it,” he reminded me, and I nodded my head in agreement.

“I did, I do like it. I’m not saying I don’t think I can work with you because I don’t like your art style, I’m saying I think it will be hard for me because…”

“Because…?” he asked, raising his brow as he waited for me to finish.

“Because it terrifies me.” I breathed out, throwing my hands in the air as I admitted my real reason for being so hesitant on working with him. “It’s… it’s so different to my style, I’ve never worked with metalwork, I’ve never seen it done before. More than that, your themes… the style and just… everything! It’s so different from what I do.”

I chanced a look at Craig after my confession, and saw that he wasn’t looking at me but off into the distance. There was a faraway look in his eyes that told me he was thinking deeply about something. I wondered for a brief moment, as he stayed silent, if I had offended him.

I was sure my words could be twisted into offense, had the wrong person listened to them, but there was something that told me Craig understood what I had meant exactly.

“Okay,” he nodded his head as he stood up. “Okay, we can work with that.”

“Work with it?” I asked incredulously. “How could we manage to come up with something that would combine both metalwork and porcelain sculptures into one cooperative piece without making it look like… like—”

“Frankenstein’s monster?” he joked, the side of his mouth quipping up slightly as he suggested it. I scoffed at him as I broke into a smile of my own.

“Exactly.” I nodded. “How would we even begin to create something that could win a competition when our styles are so different from one another? It would be a mess.”

“By doing exactly what you just said. We play on the weakness of it being unalike. Artists thrive on divergence, conflict and themes that are at odds are one of the major themes within the art world. Art thrives off of chaos, so we’ll use that.” Craig stuck his hand out to me, and I let my eyes flitter down towards it. “What do you say?”

I shook my head as I took a deep breath and shook his hand.

“Okay then,” I looked up to him. “Partners.”

If I had been paying any less attention to him, if I hadn’t been so attune to his every movement, I would have missed the way his eyes widened slightly and his grip tightened around my hand. Craig gave a stuttered nod as he pulled his hand from mine and looked away from me. “Yeah. Partners.”