Mountains of Dawn

"Nagged at Edda until she told me. Tanya, my dear, I'm afraid your guardians don't approve of me." Kevin released her and stepped back to look at her work. "How are you doing?"

"Not too bad. I shipped my painting for the competition, and decided to try a country scene." She looked at the drawing with a critical eye, then glanced back at Kevin. "So. You missed me, did you?" She grinned an impish smile at him.

He placed his hands behind his back and walked around her painting as if he didn't hear her, silent for a moment, then stopped and looked directly into her eyes. "More than you know, more than I ever thought possible." His eyes shaded deep and dark as the beginnings of a storm, the exact color she needed for her painting. "I thought I would be your next subject," he said. "What happened? What went wrong?"

Tanya shrugged. "I wanted to, but I couldn't…" She paused, struggled with words. "I needed you there, in the flesh so I could paint the real you, not the you of my mind." She felt herself blush and turned away from him.

"Tell me about your painting. Tell me how you choose a subject, how you begin to paint." He sat on a low stone wall and watched her while she began to gather her materials.

"First I decide on a subject. I chose a seascape today, to include that big cliff on the right. The sea is rough, the sky full of clouds." She paused and looked into his cloud-colored eyes, then drew in a deep breath and sighed. "That means I have plenty of elements to make a good composition. I'll add some boats and outline the mountains later. That's the first step: thinking, planning."

"And then, what? What do you do to get the image on the canvas?" He rested his chin on the palm of his hand, intent on her words.

Nervously, Tanya waved her paint brush at the far mountains. "Sketch. I do the sketch first, fill the elements in with charcoal, then use this flat brush to scumble the colors. Sometimes I thinned them with turpentine. I just finished that stage. The technical part is over." She cleaned the brush and lifted another. "I'll add thicker layers of paint with this brush-blue and green for the sea, shades of mauve and midnight blue for the sky. That's when the artist comes in." She grinned at him, warming to the subject and to her listener. He seemed truly interested. "The artist needs inspiration to decide where to draw the viewer's attention, how to give special lighting effects. And then, the difficult part begins: trying to give the painting a soul, by expressing emotions. Communicating rage, for instance, by making the surf and spray against the cliff the dominant part, or despair, by showing a boat struggling against the wind, or loneliness." She paused and looked at the ocean. "Loneliness…" She didn't finish. She knew that feeling far too well.