Artist in the Park

This will likely be a bit of a series, but it certainly doesn't need to be. This story stands on its own. I'll let the readers, or rather, the voters and the commenters decide that. Do you understand that, Literotica readers? To have a voice, you need to comment... Anonymous or logged in, it doesn't matter.

Regardless, please enjoy this for what it is, a hopefully fun romp. As always, my disclaimer is: Please don't expect deep truths or stark realism, I only aspire to the plausibly ridiculous.

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Artist in the Park

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It was a perfect storm. And by perfect storm, I mean it was an absolutely gorgeous fall day. The elements of the perfect storm were that I had no current commissions to work on, and yet I was home, instead of on the road at a show. Seriously, this was a rare, perfect storm. I try to avoid those two non-revenue-producing conditions, especially in combination, like the plague. As for the gorgeous fall day part? Those are just less common than I'd like where I live.

But this was indeed such a day, and so I had taken a walk to the park... to work. I had two pads of heavy paper, one was two by three feet, while the smaller was a foot square. My case held my current second-best set of pastels, and other miscellaneous supplies. I wandered until I found just the right place, unslung my chair from my shoulder, and positioned myself atop a slight rise with a view of two irregular copses of trees. Most of the trees were maples, but there were some others mixed in, including several young elms in the new, disease-resistant variety that I'd read about. All were in incredibly vibrant fall colors, that brief moment of vital perfection before everything falls to the ground in death, and the bare, ragged branches slumber for the winter.

I smiled. The weather would hold for three days, according to my phone. In that time, I could move around the park and do an extensive series of pieces. All different angles and times of day, depicting the same set of trees. I would pretend I was Monet in London. Hopefully, a few of the studies would be good enough for me to make prints and lithographs of to sell in quantity.

I started with the smaller pad, to get a feel for the colors of the trees.

I eased back in the chair and ripped out two or three very quick, even for me, warm-up pieces. I liked the mix of colors in the second one especially, and left it face up beside me for reference as I opened the big pad.

By 10:30, I had a big, colorful mess. It was trash when I considered what I had been trying to accomplish with it, but I also knew it was pretty, in the bland, inoffensive style that suburban housewives liked to buy and put in their hallways or laundry rooms. I set it aside. It would be worth finishing back at my condo later.

But that meant that I was facing another piece of blank paper. I scanned around to see which area I wanted to focus on, and frowned.

I wasn't bored with this already, but I sure as hell was going to be by the end of three days of rendering trees on paper. I debated sticking with the project for just the one day.

Movement caught my eye. In the open greensward of the downward slope between my vantage and the trees, I saw a mother and her two little children, both girls, setting up a blanket for a morning in the sun. The little girls were both blurs of blonde motion in their pretty, coordinating but not matching, blue dresses. I sort of half-recognized the mom, in that I had seen her in the park before. She was tall, and had a willowy figure that was attractive, but not sexy, and a bland face made interesting by a truly generous hawk nose.

I usually do either figures or landscapes--seldom figures in landscapes. But trying to capture the swift movements of those kids against the tapestry of the fall foliage seemed like it might be fun. The attempt would likely end up as an unsalable mess, but I would be entertained and fulfilled by the attempt. I hadn't become an artist for the commerce.

Not that commerce wasn't important to me, and not that I wasn't good at it. The bank and I together owned a very nice third floor condo with a view of the very park in midtown where I was currently working. My home had enough space for both living area and my small studio, and I was very committed to keeping that banking relationship cordial and that ownership in place. If this little diversion didn't work, I'd get back to the pure landscapes. Landscapes were bread and butter for me.

Fortunately for my own entertainment, the piece started working fairly quickly. The little girls were easy, I found. Their defining characteristic was movement, and so they became half-figure/half-blurs, orbiting the mother. I got enough detail on each to make them recognizable, but barely.

The mother was another thing entirely. She sat there, with those long legs folded up under her on the blanket covering the grass. She hadn't even taken off her low but elegant heels. Her slender hips and loosely clad thighs were easy to capture, the color of her trousers was easy to nail-- it barely took a few, carefully matched strokes to evoke their shape perfectly.

Her torso was harder to capture without more detail than I wanted this piece to employ. Not because she was so well-endowed. Far from it. Even given the two little girls, it was clear that the Boobie Fairy had skipped the delivery for the mother.

I wondered idly if that had bothered her. She seemed extraordinarily serene. The rest of her body had been miraculously unblemished by two pregnancies, so perhaps she was content with the balance of how things had turned out. Or maybe her husband was just not a tit man...

Her face was easy to make recognizable, with that striking nose, but I still put in the most work there. I wanted to capture the odd combination of bland and striking in her features, and to do it just right. As I worked, I decided I found her face actually more than simply attractive, and the rest of her too.

I tend to develop idle affections for the subjects of my work.

This piece was definitely not going to be an unsaleable mess. I was damned near smug as I finished my initial work on the mother's image and worked outward, drawing again on my earlier studies on the fall foliage. My eyes did keep coming back idly to the mother...

A shadow fell over my shoulder.

"Wow! That's honestly incredible," said a light, feminine voice from behind be.

"Thank you," I said turning to look at my audience. I am used, when I work in places like the park, to people stopping to watch me develop a piece. I work extraordinarily fast at this stage of a work, and some want to just observe my speed in amazement. Others stop to appreciate what I'm producing.

I never mind, either way. I keep business cards on the back of my chair, in a pocket with my name and website on a little sign. You never know when a chance meeting will result in a sale.

I involuntarily took a second glance at the woman who had approached.

She was in so many ways the polar opposite of the young mother I was working up. I estimated that she was a little older than my subject, in the same range as me--33 or so. Unlike the blonde woman on my paper, my observer had russet-colored hair that swept around her face in waves. She was short, maybe five-two, and deeply tanned. Unlike the mother, this woman wore fitness attire: grass-stained white Nikes, and black yoga pants with a two-inch, raspberry colored stripe that ran from waist to ankles. The stripe was translucent from about mid-thigh downward. She had a matching raspberry sports bra up top, bits of which were intentionally visible under a shapeless white tank top.

Weirdly, despite being dressed for a workout, she somehow felt more formally attired than the mother. Whereas that woman was calm and serene, the woman beside me seemed bold and in charge.

I'm burying the lede here.

I only occasionally have the need for professional models in my work, so on any given ordinary day I don't see any more beautiful women than you do. And the honest truth is, most human beings are just not terribly attractive, are they, unless there is that spark of in-person chemistry?

This woman was... a knockout. In any context. She had classic, symmetrically alluring features, blazing green eyes, and the kind of curves you'd love to drive a sports car along on a sunny day. I like yoga pants on a woman. There is a reason they are so popular. On a woman with hips and leg like these? Yes, please. And thank you.

And her breasts? Nothing crazy, but I found myself for the barest moment wanting to rip that goddamned loose white top off so I could get a really good look, just at how she filled that bra.

As an artist, I usually am able to spend a little more time staring at a woman than most guys can get away with. I didn't use that estimated extra time with this lady. I was afraid if I started, I would have not stopped.

"I was just out to sketch the fall foliage today, and she and her girls sat down in my view," I shrugged. "I had to do a sketch at least."

"That is a sketch?" she asked a little skeptically. "It's far too good for that."

"Thank you again," I said. "But yes, it is. For now. I'll admit, I like it quite a bit, so I will likely finish it up sometime later, along with the best of my other work today."

"It really is good," she said again, almost to herself. "They all are," she went on, looking at the other stuff I had started and/or finished already that morning. "This one especially," she added, gravitating directly to what I also thought was the best of the landscapes I had produced so far that day.

She tapped her chin thoughtfully. "I don't recognize your work, I'm embarrassed to say," she mused aloud. "Where do you exhibit?"

Oh great. She was a 'connoisseur'.

"I'm not really a gallery guy, to be honest," I said elaborately casually.

"Not yet," she said, in a still annoying, though genuinely encouraging tone. "Somebody will discover your work and get their hooks into you."

Yeah. No thanks.

She was pissing me off a little, which was really too bad.

I decided to take her down a peg or two, which wasn't a good idea, but she got under my skin as quickly as she got into my eyeballs.

"I've had a few exhibitions," I said, as if half-ignoring her while I bent to work on some more foliage. "My two biggest were back in Kansas City, where my parents lived at the time." I cocked an eye up at her. "Had to make mommy proud, don't you know?" That was actually completely true. "And Francis, who runs the Waddington here in town, brow-beat me into a small show two years ago."

"Congratulations! Though with the quality of your work, and that kind of exposure, I would think you'd be more in demand."

It is annoying when someone you want to be irritated by keeps complimenting you. It feels churlish to hate on sincere compliments. I was still managing the feat.

"Not going the gallery route was a business decision," I said, rooting through my backup set of pastels, hoping to find a few less-used sticks in the red-orange range I was looking for. "For instance, I let a gallery in San Francisco have five pieces of mine three years ago. Two have sold, for outrageous amounts, of which I saw maybe half. The others will sell eventually... hopefully," I shrugged. "Once they do, I'll have cleared, after expenses and commissions, a little better than twice what I'd have made selling those pieces myself."

"Seems like the better route, then," she said, but I could hear she knew I had more point to make and was interested in what it was. Good.

"Yeah. Except that it will probably take a total of five years to sell those five paintings, whereas, had I put them in my van and shown them in my tent or booth at events like the Columbus Arts Festival, or the Springfield Fine Arts Promenade, I'd have sold them all in five months, though admittedly for less." I found what I needed and bent to the paper to fill in a hole in the colorful panoply of the trees. "Cash flow keeps me living comfortably in the condo I own over there," I said, gesturing toward my building without looking, "instead of leading a feast to famine existence out of my van."

She stood there silently for a full minute. I worked on the foliage. It shocks some people, but with my style of work, it is often easier and faster to achieve realistic results with landscape elements than with figures.

"So, you have a volume business model because you work so quickly? That makes sense, I suppose," she mused at last.

"I don't work quickly," I barely kept from snapping. "I am 'prolific'," I added with involuntary good humor. She snorted, and I could not help but smile a bit. "Seriously, gallery works take almost twice as much time, to be theoretically ten percent better, and get paid for ten percent as fast. I find it boring and unproductive for a theoretical future payday from an unknown client. When I do commissions, on the other hand, I also spend much more time finishing, but I find that rewarding."

"Oh, you do commissions? Why are they more rewarding?"

"I get to know the buyer, and what they want. I feel like I'm being all perfectionist for a reason--for a person. And I charge quite a bit for commissions, which get paid for upon completion, so... Cash flow, remember?"

She nodded, and I looked up at her. "So, you really make your bank by painting portraits of Spot or little Fifi?" she asked.

Now she was deliberately trying to provoke me. I liked that much better than when she had been pissing me off accidentally.

"I've never done more than four pet portraits in a year," I said, matter of factly. "And I hate them."

"Too good for painting dogs and cats?" she went on, still provoking. It was genuinely not malicious, I could tell. She just seemed to have discovered she could get a rise out of me, and was the sort to enjoy that.

"Not at all," I said, not giving her the satisfaction, either way. "Those animals are clearly loved by their owners, and a deep part of their lives. Why should I not want to help them have a beautiful rendering?" I looked at her with my best wide-eyed innocent look. Then I deliberately furrowed my brow. "But they are a pain in the ass to get to sit still long enough to work with!"

She laughed.

Then I added, "Worse, they are usually getting pretty old when the owner wants the portrait. These little objects of love are getting close to the natural end of a tragically short time on Earth with their owners. It's heart-breaking sometimes."

Her spine stiffened a bit. Hopefully she could see that while I was quite serious, I was also having bit of fun with her. Despite, or perhaps in part because of, her obvious tendency to provoke for entertainment's sake, I found it pleasant to have her beside me while I worked. She wasn't really impeding my progress, and I liked a little verbal fencing myself.

And she was not a bad thing to take the occasional glance at out of the corner of my eye.

"So how much do you charge for a commissioned portrait?" she asked, looking at my work once more.

I grinned and named a figure.

I heard a low whistle, and I looked up to see her sucking her lower lip.

I didn't let her stew for long though. The possibility existed she was actually interested in a portrait... of her, or of her cat. She clearly owned no dog. People who got portraits of their dogs were never in a park without the dog in question. "Sorry. I'm teasing," I said. "That price is what my pieces mostly go for in those galleries we discussed." I named a different, lower, but still slightly inflated number. "That's for a standard dimension commissioned portrait. It would vary of course, depending on size and other factors. And how well-behaved your cat is," I added with a smile.

"I don't have a cat. Haven't for years," she said, affecting an absent visage. Ouch. My maudlin musing on the mortality ofsmol frens might have hit closer to the mark than I had intended. "I meant a portrait of yours truly," she clarified, perking back up. "My parents are building a new winter home in Florida. It would make a nice housewarming gift."

I found the idea of doing a portrait of this woman an appealing concept.

We went back and forth on format, etc. "And when can we schedule time for me to do the life-drawing portion?" I asked. "I'll need about three hours with you, then several weeks to finish things on my own."

"Weeks?"

"I do like it to be perfect when I do a commission. Plus I have to make you think I'm working enough to justify that price," I smiled.

She laughed easily. "How about today, here, whenever you finish that piece on your easel?"

"Now?" I asked. It was actually a perfect day and place for a portrait of this woman, but...

"I don't live in town. I'm here for business every month or so, but usually don't have a day off unless I make it happen," she shrugged. "Today is good for me."

Taken aback at how fast she made decisions, I stared at what I was working on. "Honestly, this is about done. Anything else I need, I can do back in my studio." I looked around. "It is a lovely day, with fabulous light. And the light breeze will add just a touch of life to your hair that I think I can capture."

"Deal?" she asked, holding out her hand. I took it.

"Deal," I said. Today was going to be a very profitable day, all of a sudden.

I realized that I was hardly set up out here for a portrait sitting. Looking around, I found myself oddly flustered about that.

"I need some things from my studio, if you really want to work out here," I said, still cataloging what those things were. "First and foremost, a comfortable chair for you to sit in," I added. "Um, I can be back fairly quickly, if you'd like to wait. Or, if you want to touch yourself up, you could come back with me and..."

I never liked asking prospective female clients back to my studio. It too often felt like I was asking them to 'come up and see my etchings.' And in this woman's case... Yeah.

"Let's meet back here in thirty minutes?" she asked, suddenly brisk and businesslike. "I'll go back to my hotel instead," she went on, waving at the old, historical hotel to the south of the park that charged as much per night for some rooms as my mortgage payment was per month. "I think I'll just change this," she said, picking at the white tank top. "I don't need my mother complaining about seeing my bra for the rest of her life."

I was vaguely disappointed by that, especially since we had already settled on the portrait only being from the shoulders up anyway. But I shrugged agreement. I'm agreeable when presented with that much cash out of the blue. We each picked up and headed off, so we could prepare.

I fleetingly considered the idea that she might not reappear. I doubted that, though. And if she did reconsider and ghost me, I was out precisely nothing.

I dropped off all the supplies I had used that morning, replacing them with a fresh pad, a lightweight, portable easel, an appropriate canvas, and a brand new set of pastels. I popped them into a bag, along with some bottles of water and a bag of potato chips. Then I re-slung my lawn chair over my shoulder, along with a matching second one for her. They had come as a set from Costco.

I returned to the park a few minutes late, which had me frustrated.

She was there already, but thankfully didn't look impatient. She had not changed the yoga pants, which I was 100% on board with, and had merely put on a loose, pale blue, collared blouse. The fabric was soft and flowing, and I was moderately sure I could see through it just enough to know she still had on that raspberry sports bra. The elegant blouse in no way went with yoga pants, but as only her shoulders would be in the portrait, it didn't matter. And I was beginning to realize that this woman would look great in mis-matched, contrasting, brown and orange plaids...