Dear Franky,
I have finally found my inspiration again. I didn't think it was possible, but here we are.
I have drafted concepts for at least ten art projects, and I've already produced a few. I've detailed them thoroughly in my art notebook, so I won't spend much time describing the technicalities to you, my cellulose friend.
First of all, my aunt was so thrilled when I told her she had inspired me to produce fresh art after ages that she cleared out her old atelier just for me. She said she doesn't have time to create original artwork nowadays, so she moved her supplies to an unused room in her villa. Now, I have an entire atelier near her restoration building to pour my soul into. It is further down from the loft she lent me, because, naturally, her industrial chemicals cannot be stored too close to the living spaces.
The first piece I produced was a canvas acrylic painting. Nothing too far from what the good old Academy of Fine Arts teaches you. I painted mimicking a Renaissance portrait of a nobleman, but my subject was Henri Delacunt. I couldn't stand ruining my afternoon by staring at photographs of him, so I painted him from memory—which was traumatic enough. I put an excruciating amount of detail into his tailored suit and flashy jewellery, but the face was entirely featureless: a smooth expanse of skin with no eyes, no mouth. I removed the judgmental gaze and the mouthpiece of arrogance to create a pacified figure, forever blind and mute. It is meant to be a critique of contemporary—and historical—society.
Oh, I wish you could speak, Franky. I am in desperate need of objective feedback. Do you think the critique is clear, or does it just look like an unfinished art piece?
The other project is still in progress, but I'm counting on finishing it later today. I'm describing it because it builds upon the previous one, and I am excited about the progression it shows.
With my aunt's permission, I set up a camera to record the heavy-duty sink she uses to clean her tools. In the frame, a plaster sculpture of a classical putto stands in the middle of the steel basin, but the camera angle is distorted and odd. In the video, I slowly pour highly concentrated hydrochloric acid directly onto its flashy, expressive classical features until they violently sizzle and melt away. I then stop the recording and rinse the remaining smooth, perfectly curved, candid surface. No arrogance, no identity left.
I envisioned this piece as a video installation, projected on a loop behind the physical, corroded putto in a standard white-cube gallery. What do you think, Franky? Can it work?
Through this latter experiment, I learned that destruction is noisy. It is chaotic and violent. But that violent sizzle is entirely necessary to obtain the absolute, smooth silence of perfection.
I will update you, Franky, as soon as I organise my portfolio. I'm so excited. I feel like I am exploding with creativity after I don't even know how many years. It's crazy, but I have missed this feeling so much.
Bye, cellulose friend. I'd better get back to my work before the muse vanishes again.
Vera
PS: OMG. You have no idea what just happened, Franky. I am writing this with hands that are still trembling.
Okay. Let me catch some air first. I think I'm going to pass out otherwise.
Ahhh. Okay, I'm alright.
Basically, right after I finished describing my art to you, Henri Delacourt visited my aunt again to check on his seventeenth-century landscape. I was upstairs editing the putto video I mentioned earlier when I heard loud screaming and yelling coming from the room below mine. I abandoned my new atelier and rushed downstairs into my aunt's restoration lab, worried about what I would find.
Guess what? Henri was aggressively complaining about my aunt's immaculate work. According to him, the tonality of the blue sky was completely wrong and mismatched with the other paintings for his upcoming exhibition. My aunt explained politely that she didn't alter the colour; she merely removed the centuries of dirt to reveal the original colour, just as she would do—and has done—with any other historical piece.
He didn't accept her answer. He belittled her work, shouting and threatening to destroy her credibility as an art restorer. I only managed to reach the room at the tail end of this tirade.
I saw my aunt looking like I had never seen her before. She was on the verge of tears, her face flushed red from profound embarrassment, but also from suppressed anger. Really, Henri should be embarrassed by his own behaviour, but self-awareness is clearly an alien concept to him.
I didn't know what to do to de-escalate the growing tension. I was so intensely annoyed by Delacunt's existence. He was testing my patience far beyond its limits.
At that precise moment, my aunt received a call from a supplier. She took advantage of the interruption and stepped out to take the call, leaving me alone in the lab with him for precisely nine minutes.
And guess what my brain told me was a good idea, Franky? I offered him an espresso. An espresso. To an angry, hyperactive man. What I should have offered him was chamomile laced with melatonin.
Regardless, he accepted with his usual lack of manners, not even looking at me, entirely absorbed by whatever was on his phone screen.
I walked to the small kitchenette in the corner. I brewed the coffee using the highest-quality capsule I could find. The dark liquid pooled into the white ceramic cup, steaming perfectly.
What happened next shocked me to my core, and hours later, I am still reeling.
As I turned to walk towards him, I caught sight of one of my aunt's highly toxic, colourless industrial solvents sitting on the counter. My synapses fired.
I moved closer to the bottle and grabbed it.
All I had to do was pour a small quantity into his cup. If ingested, it would be lethal in a matter of hours. Just a few drops to clean the room. One drop to erase the walking expense report...
But I froze. I stopped breathing entirely.
I looked at him. He was scratching his neck, his face flushed, a completely unappealing specimen of humanity. He was nothing but a stain.
It wasn't a sudden wave of moral superiority that stopped me, Franky. I didn't suddenly see the "value of human life" or feel a shred of pity for him. It was something much more primal. It was the crushing weight of reality.
I discovered today that the bridge between theory and practice is suspended over a terrifying abyss.
I looked at the toxic liquid hovering over the edge of the mug, and my mind was suddenly flooded with uncontrollable variables. What if I miscalculated the dose? What if the heat of the coffee alters the chemical compound? What if he smells or tastes that there's something off? What if he doesn't die quietly? What if he starts convulsing here on the floor, knocking over the easels, screaming, making a bloody mess? What if the police trace the chemical back to my aunt's supplies?
My heart began to hammer against my ribs so violently it made me nauseous. My hand started to shake. I placed the solvent back onto the table with a loud thud before I could spill it everywhere.
I panicked. The sheer, irreversible finality of what I was about to do suffocated me. I wasn't an artist curating silence; I was just a terrified twenty-something girl holding a vial of poison in an art restoration lab.
"Is that espresso coming anytime this year?" Delacunt barked from across the room.
My grip faltered. The ceramic cup slipped from my trembling hands and shattered on the floor, splashing hot coffee all over my shoes and ankles.
Delacourt sighed loudly, muttering something under his breath about incompetent European hires, and walked out of the studio without a backward glance.
I spent the next twenty minutes on my knees, cleaning up the spilt coffee and broken ceramic, feeling utterly humiliated.
When my aunt came back inside, I briefly explained what happened—telling her, of course, that my hands were shaking because I was still angry and intimidated by Delacourt's earlier yelling. Neither of us was up for more conversation. She asked if she could leave me alone to clean up while she took more calls, and I only saw her later for dinner.
I flew too close to the sun today. My favourite Greek myth should have been a warning sign. I thought I was ready to be the restorer, but my own biological weakness got in the way. I was afraid of the mess. I was afraid of the unknown.
I realise now that true art requires more than just a grand vision. It requires an iron stomach. It requires the absolute elimination of doubt.
I failed today, Franky. But failure is just data. I need to refine my method. I need to find something cleaner, something safer. Something that leaves absolutely no room for panic, error, or messiness.
I won't let my own biology stop me next time.
Vera