(Art Room) on Magical Arts Room and Sports

Jethro Smythe

January 28, 2012 3:40 PM

(Art Room) by Jethro Smythe

Having decided to participate in the craft workshop portion of the Midsummer Fair, Jethro thought he had better begin working on his submission. True enough that there were months between now and then, but he also had to work to try and pass his RATS exams. he was only taking two subjects, but had been consistantly receiving failing grades for the duration of his advanced classes, and he only had those few months left to try and scrape two passing grades. In that time he now also had to paint something that he was comfortable displaying in front of other people. In his whole life, painting was the one and only activity Jethro had thought he could execute with any level of skill... though he didn't really think of it as such. All he did was reproduce whatever he saw, using paint and a brush. He couldn't imagine things to paint, he simply copied the image his eyes presented to him. His skill, if that's what it was, was simply being able to copy things really well.

Arriving in the art room, Jethro initially found it to be empty. He didn't think his privacy would last very long, considering that the fair had prompted his presence there, and his hadn't been the only name on the list. He didn't usually mind other people, though, so he simply appreciated being there first to have the pick of locations. He chose a seat at an easel in good light, and looked around for something to paint. He didn't mind whether his subjects were live or still, so long as they were interesting from at least one angle. Although the walls seemed to be charmed to mimic an attractive seascape, Jethro didn't find inspiration there. He hadn't much experience of the ocean, and so didn't feel familiarity with it. Looking round the room, he didn't find any further ideas, until his eyes landed on his schoolbag.

After a couple of minutes of rummaging, Jethro had laid out two quills, an ink bottle and a crumpled sheet of spare parchment on a table top. It would do for now, at any rate. The benefit of starting this project so early was that he should have time to change his mind if he wanted to - he might even be able to do several paintings and take his pick. So his object ready and set, Jethro sat himself comfortably in front of his canvas and started to mix paint on his palette.

0 Jethro Smythe (Art Room) 146 Jethro Smythe 1 5

Jane Carey

February 07, 2012 11:13 PM

It's a very nice place by Jane Carey

Jane had flirted with the idea of making something for the Fair, but she didn’t know what chili was, really, much less how to cook it, and she tended to think of her paintings as a little too private for that. She didn’t mind the thought of public criticism, or at least she thought she didn’t mind it too much, but the thought of public analysis was far more uncomfortable for her. She knew she was going to be looking a everyone else’s work at least a little that way, so it seemed reasonable to assume that other people might look at art the same way.

Despite this, she still spent a lot of time in the art studio, sometimes lately working with the pottery clay instead of the paints, now, though she’d hardly abandoned them. She did hope Kirstenna wasn’t starting to dislike the way Jane’s projects gradually accumulated over each half of a year, giving a slightly disjointed look to Jane’s side of the room, because working on them calmed her down when she started to feel anxious or frustrated. She could go blank when she sat down with them, with everything almost feeling like it was coming off her chest through her fingers, but then she had to do something with them.

Today, she was trying to cut the bad feelings off, stop them and get rid of it all, before they could really get started. Her dormitory room was, after the trip home for midterm, looking plainer than usual now, anyway, since she’d further cluttered her room at home with everything she’d made between December and September. A little decoration would make it feel more home-like, more familiar. She wasn’t used to bare walls anymore, not with this room being here since the beginning of her third year.

That was, somehow, very strange to her. It seemed like it had been longer. Her third year was written large in her head, even now, but it seemed more distant than two years could account for, and she didn’t associate this with it at all. This was something else, and it made more sense to her, somehow, to remove it from the picture of something that, in retrospect, felt much more cohesive than it probably had been. She had to remind herself of things to keep them in the proper order, make them fit together – or not – the way they really had, rather than letting her brain try to make up simpler ways of understanding things. Things were what they were; to not acknowledge that seemed to her like the most foolish thing in the world. Her tutors, even her father, had on a few occasions assured she wasn’t old enough to fully understand most things, but she had examined her conclusion and couldn’t find a flaw in it which was stronger than the flaws in the opposing positions she’d been able to come up with.

She was still thinking about what to work on once she got in, not paying a lot of attention to her surroundings, as she opened the door to the art room, looked around by reflex to see if she had come in while someone else was working or just if the layout had changed from what she had seen the last time she was here, and stopped short when she saw Jethro there.

“Oh,” she said, at a loss for anything more eloquent for a moment. She tucked the right side of her hair back behind her ear just for a moment of something to do with her hands as she contemplated how that had surely not added anything to the potential this didn’t have to be awkward at all.

Focus, she chided herself. That wasn’t really relevant, even if it did involve the breaking of one of the lines she instinctively drew in her life. Her home life was completely separate from her life at school, just as each relationship she had was very distinct from every other; she had, she thought, friends and acquaintances, but not a group. Even in her family, there were degrees of separation, with her and Edmond having some things apart from Father. Having Father, not to mention a bunch of Smythes, abruptly dropped into what had been a perfectly straightforward thing had been a little unsettling, but it wasn’t relevant.

Besides, it was inevitable that they had to run into each other sometime in the next half a year, not least since they both did seem to spend more time than was common in here, and if she could get things off on a pleasant foot, it would mean a more pleasant spring, possibly for Edmond and Father as well. Edmond in particular had been getting more anxious than usual again lately, too, and she hardly wanted to be the cause for any more of that than she could help. Men, her mother had confided in her once, were never as strong as women, so women had to be okay for the men around them, whether they really were or not; it was just a help that she currently, mostly, was.

So she smiled just as though they had never met each other’s fathers. “Good day,” she said, moving a little further into the room after only that brief pause. “Do you mind if I join you?”

0 Jane Carey It's a very nice place 160 Jane Carey 0 5

Jethro

February 17, 2012 7:17 AM

I find it comfortable by Jethro

Although he had heard the door opening, Jethro had not paid it or its puppeteer any attention until the figure present uttered a syllable of surprise - or, more accurately, a syllable that was often asscoaited with surprise; Jane herself didn't sound especially surprised to see him there, and with good reason; it was a fairly usual occurence for the two of them to share this particular space. For such a mundance happenstance, then, Jethro couldn't deny that it felt like something a little less usual. He knew why, of course - he wasn't an expert on human emotion by any stretch of the imagination, but neither was he completely stupid (although his current grades would suggest otherwise).

"I don't mind at all," Jethro replied. It was the first time they'd properly interacted, other than passing each other in the corridors and at mealtimes, since midterm, and although their relationship had been altered in a technical capacity, Jethro didn't perceive anything to suggest it had altered fundamentally. He was, however, robbed of the usual fallback conversation-started of asking about her holiday. Luckily, he reason for being there provided an alternative opener. "Are you thinking of submitting any craftwork for the fair?" he asked.

There was something far more substantial on his mind, a question that had been puzzling him, but he knew that it would be entirely improper to ask it. There was also the possibility that he might not want to hear its answer, but it had nevertheless been causing the seventh year some distraction. He liked Jane, more than any other person he had ever met. She was smart and kind, had never told him to shut up or to go away or that he was stupid, and she looked nice, too. He hadn't originally set out to get to know Jane with the intention, or even consideration, of marrying her, but he was perfectly content with the situation. He had no real way of knowing whether this contentment was entirely one-sided. It didn't matter, of course, Cynthia had told him as much, but if Jethro thought it would make Jane miserable to be married to him then he wasn't sure what to make of that. The only way to know Jane's thoughts would be to ask her, but that just wasn't done.

0 Jethro I find it comfortable 0 Jethro 0 5

Jane

February 20, 2012 8:46 PM

And there's always something to do by Jane

Jane wasn’t sure if she should be surprised that her presence wasn’t minded or not, but then, she wasn’t too sure how surprised or not surprised she should be about anything that happened in this. She was venturing into completely foreign territory now, something that her mother had never taught her about and she had never really run across in any of her reading, not even the novels. The matter of marriage came up in them, but it wasn’t handled anything like what she’d seen so far. She supposed this was mostly because those people had much more money and status than she and Jethro did, and because the girls, at least, were typically not very intelligent, or at least not very educated.

She was both intelligent and educated, but not very rich. Her Newman grandparents had chosen to name her as the new heir to their small, pre-eleven school after her mother died, but that was hardly a goldmine, and her father was only a very minor Carey. Her only valuable connection was her brother, and Edmond’s position was always…well, a polite way to put it was ‘interesting.’ A less polite, but probably more accurate, one was ‘unstable.’ Which meant her position was unstable, too, in its own way; she didn’t have to worry about her family’s finances collapsing because her father had outspent himself, only to be rescued by a very wealthy husband, but she did have to worry about there being still more things Edmond could somehow get in the middle of without ever knowing they existed, or even interacting with the main players of those dramas until someone tried to kill him again. Honestly, Jane thought they all would have been happier and much better off if they’d buried his other two sisters along with Gwenhwyfar and Morgaine’s father under Morgaine’s garden and never spoken of them again, just as they didn’t speak about anything else related to that day. They were the ones who lived in complications, not Edmond, but he was their brother, too.

If she wasn’t careful, she was going to let life ruin her novels for her. She decided to paint another perspective on her mother’s garden. She had done three different versions of it now, but had never really gotten what she was looking for down.

“Oh, no, I don’t think so,” she said when Jethro asked if she was planning to submit anything to the fair. “Are you planning to? Some of your paintings are very good.”

Here’s the rest of my life. We’ll have family painting sessions after dinner every night, and conversations without weather about our days…. There was something comical about the mental image which came along with that thought and Jane smiled for a moment as she decided where to place the side of the house on the picture. Still, though, she supposed there were much worse ways to spend an evening. At home, they usually read aloud to each other from the newspapers. That was not the worst way in the world to spend an evening, either, but they had not really worked with anything else since her mother died.

0 Jane And there's always something to do 0 Jane 0 5

Jethro

March 02, 2012 12:27 PM

We find ways to entertain ourselves by Jethro

"Thank you," Jethro replied, sounding mildly surprised to hear Jane praise his work. He received positive recognition so infrequently that it always caught him off guard when it happened. Jane had always been very nice to him, though, so Jethro thought she might be more generous with her compliments than other people, but he took it and was pleased by it nonetheless.

"Yes, I think I probably will submit a painting," Jethro replied to her question, sounding as certain about this as he ever sounded about anything. "I just haven't decided what to paint just yet." The parchment and quill arrangement he was currently reproducing onto canvas had some interesting shadows and pleasant contrasts of lines, but the look overall was not especially inspiring. He wasn't necessarily expecting people to have a reaction one way or the other to anything he submitted to the fair, but he supposed if an observer were to form an opinion on his efforts, he would rather it was positive. Even if they, unlike Jane, believed his paintings to be awful, they might potentially be able to agree he had selected a good subject to paint. This was not the case for his current piece.

"My sister will probably be at the fair," Jethro recalled and decided to comment, considering they were already talking about the midsummer event. Cynthia hadn't yet confirmed for certain either way, but she had mentioned the possibility of her attending to distribute information. He'd also been thinking a little about his sister because he still wasn't entirely sure what she and Jane would have talked about together over midterm. Jethro thought his sister was a wonderful person, but he also knew that lots of other people found her 'difficult', whatever that meant. Jethro liked Edmond well enough, and he was the closest thing Jane had to a sibling. Cynthia had said Jane was 'pleasant and suitable,' but had not actually expressed a liking for her. Jethro wasn't sure what to make of that, either. There was as much today as ever that presented him with ample opportunity to be quietly confused.

0 Jethro We find ways to entertain ourselves 0 Jethro 0 5

Jane

March 05, 2012 10:29 PM

And that's a valuable life skill by Jane

Jane smiled sympathetically as Jethro said he was planning to submit a painting to the Fair, but that he was still undecided on a subject for it. “I’m sure something will come to you,” she said. “There’s plenty of time.”

She looked at what he was working on now, the parchment and quill. “That’s very nice,” she added, then smiled and added to that,” to me, anyway. I don’t really have a lot of memories of any of my family that don’t involve people writing things down.”

Her parents had never been scholars in the traditional sense, they had never produced a body of original work or indeed any published work at all that she knew of, but the way Edmond and Jane had been raised had focused on their education to such an extent that in her mind, it often seemed like there had been really very little else to all those years of being little and growing up. The last photograph she thought had ever been taken of her mother had been at her desk, writing notes in a blank book about a full one she had open in the same shot, occasionally glancing up to give the camera a slightly unfocused but undeniably severe look. Parchment and quills reminded her not necessarily of the best things about her childhood, but certainly they put her mind of many of the most comforting ones.

She placed two lines on the paper at the comment about Miss Smythe, thinking very quickly about how to best respond to the comment. She was still reserving final judgment on the topic of Jethro’s sister, but she knew that the older girl was going to be a complicated issue, somehow or another. Cynthia was getting quite old to be unmarried, which meant she might intended to stay unmarried and expect her brother to take care of her, and the story went that she was somewhat political, too. She knew, though, that it was best not to mention such thoughts, and especially not to Jethro. Her brother had his flaws, some of them fairly large, but he was still her brother, and she would feel at least a little bound to defend him in the same place, she supposed.

“It will be good to se eher again,” she said. She did need to get to know Cynthia, after all, and know how to get along with her if they were going to be family in a few years. “My brother will be there, too, but there’s nothing special about that.” She smiled a little wistfully, thinking that this would be Edmond’s last school event. She was worried about him right now, worried about what would happen to him as an adult out in the world, and about what would happen to her with them apart for the first time that she could remember, but she knew there was no need to talk about that any more than there was about Cynthia. They couldn’t help what happened with their siblings, not really. “And then you and he will both be finished with school,” she added. “It’s strange to think of. Would you like me to write next year?”

0 Jane And that's a valuable life skill 0 Jane 0 5

Jethro

March 06, 2012 4:20 PM

Re: And that's a valuable life skill by Jethro

Jethro continued mixing colors, washing the delicate shades across his canvas with carefully constructed brushstokes, each movement contributing its part to the replication of the shapes and light from solid form to pictoral representation. He liked to listen to Jane talk as he painted; he found her voice soothing, helping him simultaneously to relax and to concentrate.

"And then you and he will both be finished with school," Jane commented on the culmination of Edmond and Jethro's time at Sonora. He knew, of course, that life would be different after school, but from what he understood about his family's plans for him, Jethro would instead be learning about his father's attorney business. It would be a lot like still being at school, but there would only be him in classes, and there would be no final exams to fail. He would also be living at home again, and so would probably see his family more than he had done for the past seven years, but this wouldn't be a permanent alteration; Jethro knew he would be expected to start his own home within the next few years. It was a daunting prospect, but Cynthia had promised she would help him through the transition, and whenever Jethro remembered that Jane would be there with him, he didn't feel so overwhelmed. "Would you like me to write next year?"

Jethro lifted his paintbrush for a moment to gaze at Jane as she asked her question. "I would like that very much," he told her earnestly, his eyes momentarily softening from the frown they often form as an incident of concentration when practising art. "I mean, if it won't be too much trouble to fit in around your classes," he added as an after-thought. Jane would begin studying for her RATS next year, and Jethro didn't want to impose unnecessary obligations. "Though if you do have the time, I'm sure it would be very nice to hear from you." Being away from his school friends, like Andrew and Jose, was going to be enough of an adjustment to make. If he couldn't talk to Jane on a regular basis, even by written correspondence, Jethro imagined he would be lonely. "I can write to you, too, if you like."

0 Jethro Re: And that's a valuable life skill 0 Jethro 0 5

Jane

March 07, 2012 10:55 PM

So it's good that we have it by Jane

Jane was momentarily confused by the mention of her classes, but then remembered: RATS. Next year was her sixth year, and while it was a little bit of a lull between fifth and seventh, it was still stressful for most people because it was the first year of studying for the RATS. The classes were supposed to be very difficult, and the more of them you took, the more difficult it was supposed to get.

That would hold true for her – the more classes she took, the less time she would have. She didn’t think, for instance, that she was going to follow in her brother’s footsteps and try to take every course of study the school offered. She could do it, but she would get nothing out of it, and so she didn’t want to put herself through that much trouble, especially since she thought that she had a chance of being Head Girl in her seventh year. It would be close, she was sure, with Autumn making a good candidate, too, but Jane thought she’d at least make the ballot. Instead, then, she planned to look at her CATS scores and think on it for a time and then pick a handful of courses, so she could keep things in something like balance.

“It won’t be a problem,” she said. “I enjoy writing letters. And getting them. I'd like it if you wrote.”

That was true, too. The essay was the writing form her mother had emphasized most, but Jane’s favorite was the letter. Communicating through letters was so different from interacting in person, and often more elegant. She would rather be with her father and brother than writing to them, of course, especially now when Father was so sick sometimes, but you learned to make do with what was available. She was curious about what kind of letters Jethro would write, she had to admit; both of their lives were likely to be uninteresting, she thought, but it was possible to learn about people from what they wrote, and how – or so she thought. It would be interesting enough to test the idea.

0 Jane So it's good that we have it 0 Jane 0 5