[for Curnen] so what you see is not what you see

[st_rangepalette]

One afternoon, Lillith had been out for a walk, appreciating the slant of the spring sunlight and the hints of new color in the landscape. Curnen's music, from the new violin which Lillith believed to have been belonged to someone in her family, had filtered through the bushes and trees, and mingled with the sunlight to dance and dapple the lawn and the pathways.

She had, of course, followed the music to the source, but what she had seen... it had stopped her short. On the station, she had asked, when Curnen's wings returned, what would she see? What her heart saw (far more so than her eyes) now was an answer to that question. Instead of speaking, she had run on light hooves back to her room and immediately begun to put down in sketches and sweeping brushes of paint what she had felt.

It had taken many days for her to complete a painting that revealed Curnen as Lillith had seen her. And it was not, when it was finished, very realistic. Rather it was the shape and lines of Curnen playing, dancing and twining through gentle washes of watered colors that were at once the light, the music, the moment, and butterflies. But there were, around the shape of Curnen, two sparkling shadows, there but not there, suggested but not seen.

When she was satisfied with it and it had dried, Lillith draped it in a piece of silk that had been a scarf. She pinned to it a single white card and on it written a single word.

Wings.

And one evening when no one seemed to be about, she carried it out and then delivered it outside Curnen's door.


- Painting is an illusion, a piece of magic, so what you see is not what you see. - Phillip Guston