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I was putting on my shoes when the front door opened from the outside.
“……”
The man, hand on the doorknob, stopped short upon seeing me. Lowering his gaze with an expression that said the timing was bad.
This was also the man who, just half a year ago, would smile as if he had the whole world whenever our eyes met.
“Where have you been?”
I asked him as I straightened up after tightening the laces of my Converse. My own attitude toward him had become just as dry.
“Just… for a walk.”
In the cramped entryway, no bigger than a flattened ramen box, we twisted our shoulders to trade places, barely managing to continue our awkward conversation. The night before, we had fought for about five hours under the guise of a discussion, and when I woke up late, he was gone, having left without even eating.
“Going to your tutoring session?” he asked in a perfunctory tone as he took off his sneakers and stepped up into the kitchen.
Since that spring, I had been drawing with my older Noona’s friend’s son at their house. It was a job I had taken on to alleviate our financial struggles even a little, but over the nearly a year I’d been teaching, I had come to enjoy and look forward to my time with the child. It was also one of the few times during that period when I could breathe freely and dream.
The joy of encouraging and watching the growth of a possibility filled with a hot, ever-changing energy, one that possessed both talent and passion.
It wouldn’t be wrong to call it an art tutoring session, since I was being paid to look over his drawings, but I had never instructed the child to fix his overly unique traits, telling him they could harden into bad habits, nor had I ever taught him techniques, like where to place the highlight and where to put the reflected light to render a sphere.
The child was already drawing using skills beyond what was attainable for his age. There was no need to guide him on the techniques he had yet to master, either. It was clear he would figure them out on his own.
“I’m off. Make sure you get something to eat.”
I left the entryway, leaving behind the sight of him taking off his jumper, dropping it to the floor, and immediately getting under the covers and turning his back to me. The air outside was chilly enough to make me pull the collar of my coat tighter, but my breathing felt as suffocating as if I were in the middle of a 40-degree heatwave.
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The moment I opened the front door and stepped inside, the child came running with his sketchbook and practice notebook. A week’s worth of sketches and colored drawings.
Thanks to his parents, an oil painter and a manhwa artist, he was surrounded by a wealth of various art supplies, and so the child had developed an outstanding sense for choosing and using the materials that best suited the feeling he wanted to express. From crayons, poster colors, acrylics, and oil paints to markers, colored pencils, and even ballpoint pens, his drawings showed astonishing growth every week.
This wasn’t just about his innate talent. The child was a fanatic, a practice fiend.
That week’s theme was the side profile. An entire practice notebook, which looked to be over thirty pages, was filled with drawings of people’s side profiles. For whatever reason, he had become fixated on them that week.
The moment something special entered his field of vision, the child wanted to transfer it onto paper exactly as he saw it. He drew and drew until he could express it to his satisfaction. In that process, his technique developed naturally.
Whether one was painting an ink wash or an abstract piece, solid descriptive power was the foundation of all art. And the child was born with a strong obsession for it.
Whenever I discovered that fanatical, tenacious obsession and immersion in this child—who seemed like a very ordinary elementary schooler, cheerful and active, sometimes mischievous as an eleven-year-old should be, but fundamentally bright and gentle—I would feel a thrill at the possibility of his talent.
It was a crucial quality for a painter. The desire to transfer what I see with my own eyes onto my canvas exactly as it is. A fever, like jealousy, that rises when you can’t sleep or swallow food if you fail to realize it, as if something of yours has been stolen.
I had to control my breathing to suppress my excitement as I flipped through the lively drawings, which were so precise and yet perfectly captured their subjects’ characteristics that it was hard to believe they were the work of a child about to turn twelve.
In an age where geniuses were pouring out of every field, perhaps the sketching ability of an eleven-year-old, not a five or six-year-old, was nothing to make a fuss about.
But it wasn’t just the technical perfection that thrilled me.
Art is not just about copying something like a photocopier. The child was able to add his own emotions and interpretations of the subject to his drawings. At the tender age of eleven. Though they might be clumsy, each and every one of those drawings was a form of “self-expression” that only he could create.
“Yeehyeon, how many pages is this? Didn’t your arm hurt?”
The child smiled at my worried question. His silent smile, as he rubbed his hand over the table where we sat facing each other, seemed a little shy. And he also looked bewildered, as if he didn’t quite understand what I meant.
I realized. My question just now was the same as asking a ten-year-old who had just come back from playing having fun if his legs didn’t hurt.
With the exception of special geniuses and prodigies, school studies were a game where results followed if you invested a certain amount of time and effort. It was a rite of passage that everyone went through, where there was no need to feel miserable by comparing yourself to special geniuses and prodigies.
But art was different.
It was a field one chose to enter based on the judgment that one had more talent than others, and it was only natural to feel miserable if you failed to produce results there. The process of confirming the reality that the person you thought was special was, in fact, nothing special was harsh.
Of course, your technique improved to some extent if you practiced and invested time, but eventually, you hit a wall that couldn’t be overcome by skill alone. The realm of the “real ones,” which could not be surpassed by merely being “good at drawing.” The moment you encountered the world of the real ones, who spoke and asserted themselves through their art, you were confronted with the shabbiness of realizing that what you had been drawing was but a tiny corner of the universe.
To put it somewhat cruelly, my art was just a “high-class picture diary,” a personal story that could not move anyone or elicit any empathy.
I too was an art student who had gone through an entrance exam to an art academy and entered art school, but students who had both technique and their own style were so rare it was difficult to even calculate a percentage. It wasn’t a matter of 10% or 20%… but one in tens of thousands. It couldn’t even be compared to the ratio of Omegas, who were a bit rarer than Alphas.
When I first learned of him, the one rumored to be a monster in the Department of East Asian Painting. When I faced his art, which seemed to hesitate and waver, yet in an instant would boldly assert itself and charge head-on.
I was seized by the shock of encountering another person’s raw flesh through a painting. In front of a work that exposed, without exaggeration or reduction, the shameful parts everyone tried to hush up and hide, technique or skill was a secondary matter.
It was the first time I realized I had more of a talent for “recognizing” art than for “making” it. In front of his painting, rather than feeling jealous, as a fellow art student, I found myself giddy with the desire to show his work to more people.
We had been so strongly convinced that we were soulmates who understood each other’s worlds better than anyone, so why, how, did we end up like this….
The child didn’t know it, but at the time, I was a married college student.
It was a marriage between an Alpha and a Beta, carried out against the immense opposition of our families and everyone around us. Thanks to that, I had to leave home, practically disowned by my parents, and live in financial hardship, but I had a strong conviction in our choice and in his talent.
But what awaited us after the dizzying passion was the reality of having to accept each other’s bare faces.
He certainly had a special talent, but he had a side that was overly self-conscious. There were more days spent in gloom, comparing himself to those more brilliant, than days showing ambition in front of his art.
I, who was born with a personality that tackled everything with enthusiasm, and he, who had a disposition to burrow inward and curl up, were fundamentally unable to understand each other. I can accept more about others now than I could then, but around twenty-one or twenty-two, it wasn’t easy to understand someone who was at the extreme opposite end of the spectrum from yourself.
I admit it. As those around us said, we were too young to understand the practical meaning of the union that is marriage. We were at an age where we couldn’t even properly control ourselves and our own dreams. To the point where we were sometimes crushed by those dreams.
Whenever I faced the child’s art, his unique style not yet fully mature but singularly captivating, the memory of the tremor I felt when I first stood before his painting felt like it was being pushed further away, into the distant past.
Erasing the bitter sentiments that followed, I forced a smile and asked the child.
“Where should we go today? What do you want to draw?”
We usually went outside and looked around to find a subject for the day’s drawing.
“Uhm…”
The child, who seemed to have something in mind, hesitated for a moment before grinning and pointing at me.
“Me?”
When I asked back, my eyes wide at the unexpected answer, the child nodded, still smiling.
That day, after about ten months of drawing together, I became the child’s model.
As I read a book with the plant-filled veranda as my backdrop, bathed in the winter sunlight that seemed uniquely cozy to that house, I stole glances at our little artist capturing my image on an 8-panel sketchbook, not even a canvas, and for a brief moment, I was able to dream again in peace.
And when I received the painting that a mere eleven-year-old child had drawn for two straight hours without even a ten-minute break…
I learned that providing an answer to a problem is not the only form of quality comfort. That words of understanding and sympathy that temporarily numb the present pain are not the only form of comfort.
The painting wasn’t precise, as there hadn’t been enough time to add color. Instead, he had used other elements to express the atmosphere he wanted to convey. It was one of the child’s specialties.
Bold strokes that brought out a texture as if carved with a rough chisel, even without using any oil paints; a dark mood drawn out with what at first glance seemed to be warm colors, or a warm hope planted within a seemingly dark atmosphere.
The me in the painting was suffering from dissonance and division. The painting was me at that time, so much so that my brow furrowed at the vivid thickness and sharpness of the pain.
But strangely, there was comfort in it.
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