Stuff I have written for school.

Cubism

(this was my art project last year i think i scared my teacher whoops)

It starts with a sketch. Maybe it is a bottle, a bowl of fruit. Maybe it is a tattered shoe, a clarinet. You pencil in each minute detail, run fingers over tiny ridges until you could carve it from marble, sculpt it from clay, until you know it so well you picture it whenever you close your eyes. 

Now that it is imprinted in your mind, pressed into weathered finger-tips of hands cramped from drawing, turn it round, draw it again and again and again, paste it onto itself, angles and curves and sharp lines and corners and textures all blend into one, shadows interweave, layer upon layer upon smudged layer. 

Suspend it from the ceiling and draw it from beneath, upon this draw it 17 degrees from the original angle. Draw until the shape of your pencil is moulded into your hand, until your veins stand out against your leathery skin; until your fingers are grey and everything you touch seems to turn to ash. 

When you have its very essence, rip it open, tear it apart, reach into the bleeding wreck and wrench out its innards, let your hands become stained with trailing threads of carnelian, your face spattered with tiny flecks of it. 

Then you seal it up, sew the broken shell back together and draw it again until the object and the work become one and the same. Patch the gaps in the page with skin, collage finger-nails and newspaper clippings and tea stains onto the wild creature you have created, try to smother it in itself once more. 

Take ink, black and bottomless as the depths of space and draw thick, intersecting lines across the page. Take the already broken thing and drop it, let it shatter, let the shards scrape out patches of nothingness and gnaw and grate like teeth embedded in a jaw that lives to snap; but do not let it cross the lines that you have drawn. 

Then paint segments of it with coffee, juice in bright orange, smear its innards on it and let the blood seep into the gaps you couldn't repair with skin. Let your bleeding fingers claw at the original sketch, trace the details with fingertips rubbed raw. 

Then it is finished. When you step outside at last, when you look around you, your eyes will ache and your mind will reel because nothing overlaps and there is order. Look at the sky and the deep purple clouds rumbling on the horizon will look like blood clots.