“Yeah, and not just in drawing or painting. The same goes for sculpting and music too, I’m pretty sure. It might all seem like pure emotion and artistic talent at first blush, but if you actually take a closer look, you’d find that there’s a surprising amount of science behind your favorite art.”
“Can you give me an example?”
“Well, let’s say you’re trying to choose what colors of paint to use in a painting,” I began. “Just in terms of the bare basics, there’s all sorts of color-related theories and diagrams that you can map out to figure out what shades will look best with one another, or make the best contrast, which you can triangulate via color triad, and so on… Stuff like that.”
“Wow,” she said. “That all sounds really boring.”
“Well, there’s more to it than that, of course. Say you were going to paint a sunflower, for instance. What color would you want to use for the background?”
“Something that would make the yellow stand out, I guess? Like blue or green?”
“You’d think so, right? But one of Vincent van Gogh’s Sunflowers pieces sold at auction to a Japanese insurance magnate to the tune of 5.8 billion yen, and that one used yellow for its background.”
“Wait, so it was yellow on yellow?”
“Yep. And we all agree that’s great art, so there must be something to it, right?”
The oil painting of the Annunciation in front of us used a mixture of bright blues and reds for the Virgin Mary’s garb—she wore red clothes with a blue hooded cape. This was a fairly common representation of the Virgin Mary, but it was also a color scheme you saw very frequently in American comics, for instance. Some might argue that it was due in part to those being patriotic colors used in the American flag, but it could also very well be that there was something inherently “transcendent” about that particular color combination.
“There was a friend of mine in that art club who was extremely talented but didn’t care one bit about artistic theory and whatnot,” I added. “They just believed in the images they envisioned in their head as though they were absolute—sacred, almost—and painted them through that faith in their vision alone.”
“And I take it you were the exact opposite type?” asked Ayane.
“Well, I guess I just didn’t have their level of confidence. I’d spend forever studying composition and trying to map out my paintings all proportionally in accordance with time-honored techniques. Like, whenever I drew a human subject, I’d pull out a ruler and make sure that the sum of the lengths of their arms and shoulders was equal to their height.”
“What’s the point of that?”
“Well, because if you measure a real human, with their arms outstretched from fingertip to fingertip, you’ll find that the length is almost exactly as wide as that person is tall,” I explained, stretching my own arms wide out to indicate. “It’s called your ‘wingspan,’ basically. If you’ve ever seen Leonardo da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man, that’s a pretty good illustration of this concept.”
“And you’re always thinking about stuff like this when you draw?” she asked. “Are you trying to make paintings or anatomy diagrams here?”
“It’s just a little trick you can use to give your artwork better and more realistic proportions. That’s all.”
“So what was it that got you into painting in the first place?”
“I like to cite this one time back in elementary school. My mother and father both heaped loads of praise on me for a particular painting I’d done. That almost never happened, so it kind of stuck with me, I guess.”
We entered paintings we did in class into a big art competition for our age group, and mine just so happened to win an award. That made both of my parents very, very happy. They were so proud of my achievement that they didn’t even argue with one another a single time that day, and for once, I got to experience the illusion of living in a happy family. It meant a lot to me at the time, and in retrospect, was probably why I kept on painting—an attempt to gain their continued approval.
Ayane and I spent a good while wandering around the museum and appreciating each exhibit in the dark before finally heading back outside. Upon exiting the building, I half-expected to be hit by a crisp, cool breeze, or perhaps the strong scent of evergreens—but no such luck. Being a ghost was a bland, flavorless form of existence.
We rose up into the night sky once more with the moon still hanging brightly over us. We passed by a few pigeons, frozen in flight, as we made our way up to a steel radio tower standing in the middle of the forest, and then perched ourselves up on one of its upper beams, sitting side by side. This was merely an illusion, of course, because if we let gravity do its work, our legs would pass right through the steel. But since we imagined ourselves sitting on it, our weightless bodies were fixed in place.
Ayane gazed off into the distance, where the nightscape of our familiar city dotted the horizon with a thousand tiny pinpricks of light. “Pretty, isn’t it?” she said. “Like you took a sky full of stars and anchored each one down to the earth.”
“There’s probably even more of them than our eyes can see right now, just considering how time has slowed to a stop,” I pointed out. “LEDs and fluorescent lights, for example, only work by flickering rapidly on and off. A good portion of those must’ve been frozen in an unilluminated state.”
“Why can’t you just shut up and enjoy the beauty of it for what it is?”
I turned and looked over at her, glimpsing at her face from the side. Set against the full darkness of the night, her pale, lifeless skin stood out more prominently than ever.
Figuring this was probably the best opportunity I would get, I finally asked her a question that had been gnawing at my brain for days. The one thing I just couldn’t reconcile.
“Why did you kill yourself, Ayane-san?”
She ran her fingers up through her hair, then back along her scalp. As her bangs fell back into place, she let out a sigh of resignation.
“I didn’t kill myself,” she said.
“So you’re telling me that’s the one thing the rumors got wrong, then? Even though they were right about everything else?” I asked.
“I don’t know what to tell you. Maybe someone figured it would make the story more interesting, so they tacked on that little detail and everyone else ran with it.”
“Wow. And here I convinced myself that we were kindred spirits. I looked up to you, even, as someone who actually managed to do the deed. I was going to ask your advice on preferred methods and everything.”
“Yeah, sorry. Afraid I can’t be of much help to you there,” Ayane said.
“I guess I did find it a little strange though—with how you’re still listed as a missing person on the National Police Agency website.”
“Oh, yeah. Probably because they never found my body,” she said nonchalantly—as though it were nothing. Like we were just making simple small talk. “I was murdered, basically.”