Aquarelle [h.s]

thirteen

"What is that?"

I followed Mrs Haynes's gaze in the second she spoke, realising that she was looking at the pictures I'd taken of Harry not too long before, when we'd played with paint. "Oh, just some pictures. He's my model" I replied.

She'd decided to come around to see what she could've wanted in her exhibition that day, and I couldn't help but be glad about it, feeling like I desperately needed some guidance, as I had no idea of what kind of artwork could've been nice enough for that. I had some quite nice things, a couple of drawings and a painting of Harry, and then a lot of pictures too, but I couldn't help but feel like there was something missing in them.

"Stunning. I want this one" she said, flicking through them and stopping at a certain one.

I stared at the picture, and then back at her, a confused look on my face. "What?"

"For the exhibition. I want this one."

"Are you sure?" I couldn't help but ask. They were just pictures after all, they weren't even colour-corrected or anything. They were simple prints of simple pictures.

She sent me a warm, but severe glance, her dark brown eyes honest. "Miss Regan, I've been in the art industry for over thirty years. I can recognise something promising when I see it."

"Alright" I said, giving her a nod. If she wanted that picture, I wouldn't have been the one to tell her no.

She put it back on the table. "What else do you have?" She asked, glancing around at the studio.

I gave her a little shrug. "Not much, unfortunately. Just a bunch of pictures, some paintings and some drawings" I replied honestly. I was a bit annoyed that I hadn't been able to make more artworks, but at the same time I knew I shouldn't have, especially considering I'd only had a month, and I'd definitely had a lot of issues with Harry at the start.

"A drawing? I thought you only painted" she said, a hint of surprise in her voice.

"Oh, no. I'm still trying to find my way" I told her letting out a little laugh but stopping right away when I realised how unprofessional that sounded. I'd already had the incredible luck of having some of my artworks in art exhibitions, and yet I had no idea of what I was doing. I couldn't help but wonder what I was doing there, at times. If that was my place at all. I was sure that all the other artists of the paintings hanging around mine in those exhibitions had their idea of art well formed in their mind already.

Mrs Haynes nodded, not seeming to have read into my words as much as I had. "Let's see a drawing" she simply said, and I nodded, going through the few I had to find the perfect one.

I stopped at the first drawing of Harry I'd made, the one I'd started even before he'd agreed to become my model. It had turned out to be a quite nice black and white one, definitely the perfect one if I wanted to show her what my drawing style was like. "Here" I said, turning it around so that she could see it.

She stared at it for a few seconds, an unreadable look in her eyes as she scanned the paper with an attentive gaze. Right when I was starting to get a bit on edge, thinking that she didn't like it, she spoke. "This is... incredibly good, Miss Regan" she said, a hint of unexpectedness in her voice, and I widened my eyes, not having truly expected her to like it.

It was methodical, a bit rehearsed, a quite nice work of hyperrealism, overall. But nobody I'd met had ever truly liked that kind of thing. My old art teacher would've said it looked too still, almost fake, with no emotion in it of any kind. Harry, too, had told me that I should've learnt to differentiate a bit, in the past. But Mrs Haynes liked it, for some reason. I certainly hadn't expected that.