Astrid Magnussen (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
white_oleander) wrote2019-08-11 06:58 am
white_oleander) wrote2019-08-11 06:58 am
Entry tags:
Hollywood, California, 1993. Sunday [08/11 FT].
Claire took Astrid to see the Kandinsky show at the art museum. She’d never liked abstract art as much. She would remember her mother and her friends going over a canvas that was just black and white pinstripes, or a big red square, while Astrid preferred art that was of something. Cezanne card players, Van Gogh’s boots. She liked tiny Mughal miniatures, and ink-brushed Japanese crows and cattails and cranes.
But if Claire wanted to see Kandinsky, they’d go see him. Astrid's life had developed into long stretched of nothing interrupted by whatever it was Claire wanted to do, or needed to. Art shows, garden parties, getting new headshots for her portfolio. She felt better once she got to the museum, the familiar plaza, the fountains, the muted lighting, the softened voices. The way Starr felt in church, that’s how Astrid felt at the art museum, both safe and elevated. Kandinsky wasn’t all that abstract, either; she could still see the Russian cities with their turbaned towers, and horsemen three abreast with spears, cannons, and ladies in long gowns with high headdresses. Pure colors, like the illustrations in a picture book.
All those splashes of color made her wish she could share this with Sabine, which was, usually, another frequent effect of the museum. Even if she thought she would hate what was on display, she kept imagining her old roommate there beside her, offering her two cents, not with words, but with a brightening of her eyes or a curl of her lip.
In the next room, the pictures were dissolving.
“Can’t you feel the movement?” Claire said, pointing out a big angle on the canvas, the tip facing right, the fan left. The edge of her hands following the lines. “It’s like an arrow.”
The guard watched her excited hands, too close to the painting for his liking. “Miss?”
She flushed and apologized, like an A student who’d overslept once in her life. She pulled Astrid back to sit on a bench, where she was safe to gesticulate. She tried to let herself feel it, the way Claire did. Things that weren’t there, that might not be there.
“See,” she said, quietly, keeping her eye on the guard. “The yellow comes toward you, the blue moves away. The yellow expands, the blue contracts.”
The red, the yellow, this well of dark green— expanding, contracting, still pools with bleeding edges, an
angle like a fist. A boy and a girl, arms around each other’s shoulders, drifted past the pictures, like they were passing shopwindows.
“And see how he takes the edge away from the frame, making an asymmetrical edge?” She pointed to the lemon ribbon curving the left side.
Astrid had heard people say things like this in museums, and had always thought they were just trying to impress their friends. She may have been a bit guilty of it herself. But this was Claire, and Astrid knew she really wanted her to understand. She stared at the painting, the angle, the ribbon. So much going on in Kandinsky, it was like the frames were having trouble keeping the pictures inside.
In another gallery, Claire stopped in front of a bunch of pencil sketches. Lines on paper, angles and circles, like pickup sticks and tiddlywinks. Like what you’d doodle while you were talking on the telephone. Like Mae's sketches if she didn't have a subject or an idea, perhaps.
“See this angle?” She pointed at a sharp angle in pencil, and then gestured over to the massive composition that all the sketches and oil studies led up to. “See it?” The angle dominated the canvas.
She drew Atrid's attention to various elements of the pencil sketches, circles, arcs, and she found them in the finished composition, in vibrant red, and a deep graded blue. He had all the elements right from the start. Each sketch held its own part of the idea, like a series of keys that you had to put all together to make the safe open. If Astridcould stack them and hold them to the light, she would see the form of the completed composition. SHe stared, dumbfounded at the vision.
They walked arm in arm through the show, pointing out to each other details that recurred, the abstracted
horsemen, the towers, the different kinds of angles, the color changing as a form crossed another form. Mainly, it was the sense of order, vision retained over time, that brought Astrid to her knees.
She sat on a bench and took out her sketch pad, tried to draw the basic forms. Acute angles, arcs, like the
movement of a clock. It was impossible. She needed color, she needed ink and a brush. She didn’t know what she needed.
“Imagine the work to assemble all this in one place,” Claire said. “The years of convincing people to lend their artworks.”
Astrid imagined Kandinsky’s mind, spread out all over the world, and then gathered together. Everyone having only a piece of the puzzle. Only in a show like this could you see the complete picture, stack the pieces up, hold them to the light, see how it all fit together. It made her hopeful, like someday her life would make sense too, if she could just hold all the pieces together at the same time.
They went back twice a week for the rest of the summer. Claire bought Astrid oil pastels so she could work in color without making the guards nervous. They would spend all day in a single room, looking at one picture. She had never done that before. A composition from 1913 presaged the First World War. “He was very sensitive. He could tell it was coming,” Claire said. The blackness, the cannons, wild, a mood so violent and dark, of course he had to invent abstraction.
The return to Russia. The exuberance of the avant-garde, but the darkening suspicion that it was coming to a close, even as it was flowering. On to the Bauhaus in the twenties. Straight lines, geometric forms. You didn’t let yourself go in times like that. You tried to find some underlying structure. Astrid understood him perfectly. Finally, the move to Paris. Pinks and blues and lavenders. Organic forms again, for the first time in years. What a relief Paris must have been, the color, the ability to be soft again.
Astrid wondered how she would paint her times. Shiny cars and wounded flesh, denim blue and zigzagged dog teeth, bits of broken mirror, fire and orange moons and garnet hearts.
And she figured out, finally, how she would finally get to sending out those postcards to her friends back in Fandom, which she'd put off so long she wondered if she should even really bother, but she had a nice new stack of postcards just begging to be filled.
To Sabine:
I've been really terrible about this whole keeping in touch thing, huh? Well, I've been spending most of my summer in a musuem, so I figured you can at least approve of that. There's this special exhibit by this guy named Kandinsky, I think you'd really find his work interesting. That's his work on the postcard, really abstract, too much for me at first, but I've really grown to appreciate what he does and especially his use of color.
Anyway, I'm trying not to think about having to go back to school, especially since the classes aren't nearly as fun here as they are there. But it sounds like you guys've had an interesting summer. I'd love to see more of your work depicting what's happened, those were really great! The walls of my bedroom are way too bare, anyway, and now the nice Durer rabbit that was there when I got there has some company.
I hope you're doing well, and if they stick you with a new roommate this fall, I hope they're not too bad.
Sincerely,
Astrid
To Mae:
A postcard of your drawings is so much better than just some dumb art print; I'd draw you one in response, but we've been going to this art exhibit at the museum by this guy named Kandinsky, and I didn't really like him at first, but he's really starting to grow on me and I thought I'd send everyone one of the pieces that have been inspiring me lately. The past isn't weird for me, but, I mean, it's not the past for me either? My foster mom is an actress, though, or at least she's trying to be, and my foster dad works on a TV show, so we go to a lot of places and there's famous people there, but it's weird because they don't seem like famous people, they just seem like normal people, they're a lot smaller and more plain than you'd think. It's way weirder than when I went to parties with my mom, because people don't usually know what to expect with artists and poets and writers, but with celebrities you expect stuff.
I don't know, it's weird, and I guess I'm rambling, and postcards aren't good for rambling, there isn't enough space. I guess we both have that problem.
Sabine sent me some pictures of the some of the crazy things going on out there this summer. I'd like to see some of your takes on it, too, if you could. You don't have to, but if you did, I'll definitely take you starlet watching sometime.
Also, I'd love to see all the weird old art in Possum Springs, too.
-Astrid.
For Norman:
nevermind about the VCR. Ron said that if you want to see the show, you'll have to wait until it airs, and I don't think I could really explain to him about time travel and multiple dimensions. But it's the thought that counts? Sorry it sounds like the summer's been hectic, Sabine sent me some art of some of the stuff, but that was a while, and maybe things have calmed down. If anything, the next semester should be interesting, right? It's almost time for that, isn't it? You'll have to tell me how the welcome picnic goes. I'm definitely not getting one of those at Fairfax High.
Talk to you later,
Astrid.
[[ I have been picking at this post since pretty much the start of July, lol, but I finally DID IT. Whoo! Open for calls or letters or maybe even poking because you just so happen to be in early '90s Hollywood for whatever reason~~ First section cribbed heavily from Chapter 17 of White Oleander by Janet Fitch! ]]
But if Claire wanted to see Kandinsky, they’d go see him. Astrid's life had developed into long stretched of nothing interrupted by whatever it was Claire wanted to do, or needed to. Art shows, garden parties, getting new headshots for her portfolio. She felt better once she got to the museum, the familiar plaza, the fountains, the muted lighting, the softened voices. The way Starr felt in church, that’s how Astrid felt at the art museum, both safe and elevated. Kandinsky wasn’t all that abstract, either; she could still see the Russian cities with their turbaned towers, and horsemen three abreast with spears, cannons, and ladies in long gowns with high headdresses. Pure colors, like the illustrations in a picture book.
All those splashes of color made her wish she could share this with Sabine, which was, usually, another frequent effect of the museum. Even if she thought she would hate what was on display, she kept imagining her old roommate there beside her, offering her two cents, not with words, but with a brightening of her eyes or a curl of her lip.
In the next room, the pictures were dissolving.
“Can’t you feel the movement?” Claire said, pointing out a big angle on the canvas, the tip facing right, the fan left. The edge of her hands following the lines. “It’s like an arrow.”
The guard watched her excited hands, too close to the painting for his liking. “Miss?”
She flushed and apologized, like an A student who’d overslept once in her life. She pulled Astrid back to sit on a bench, where she was safe to gesticulate. She tried to let herself feel it, the way Claire did. Things that weren’t there, that might not be there.
“See,” she said, quietly, keeping her eye on the guard. “The yellow comes toward you, the blue moves away. The yellow expands, the blue contracts.”
The red, the yellow, this well of dark green— expanding, contracting, still pools with bleeding edges, an
angle like a fist. A boy and a girl, arms around each other’s shoulders, drifted past the pictures, like they were passing shopwindows.
“And see how he takes the edge away from the frame, making an asymmetrical edge?” She pointed to the lemon ribbon curving the left side.
Astrid had heard people say things like this in museums, and had always thought they were just trying to impress their friends. She may have been a bit guilty of it herself. But this was Claire, and Astrid knew she really wanted her to understand. She stared at the painting, the angle, the ribbon. So much going on in Kandinsky, it was like the frames were having trouble keeping the pictures inside.
In another gallery, Claire stopped in front of a bunch of pencil sketches. Lines on paper, angles and circles, like pickup sticks and tiddlywinks. Like what you’d doodle while you were talking on the telephone. Like Mae's sketches if she didn't have a subject or an idea, perhaps.
“See this angle?” She pointed at a sharp angle in pencil, and then gestured over to the massive composition that all the sketches and oil studies led up to. “See it?” The angle dominated the canvas.
She drew Atrid's attention to various elements of the pencil sketches, circles, arcs, and she found them in the finished composition, in vibrant red, and a deep graded blue. He had all the elements right from the start. Each sketch held its own part of the idea, like a series of keys that you had to put all together to make the safe open. If Astridcould stack them and hold them to the light, she would see the form of the completed composition. SHe stared, dumbfounded at the vision.
They walked arm in arm through the show, pointing out to each other details that recurred, the abstracted
horsemen, the towers, the different kinds of angles, the color changing as a form crossed another form. Mainly, it was the sense of order, vision retained over time, that brought Astrid to her knees.
She sat on a bench and took out her sketch pad, tried to draw the basic forms. Acute angles, arcs, like the
movement of a clock. It was impossible. She needed color, she needed ink and a brush. She didn’t know what she needed.
“Imagine the work to assemble all this in one place,” Claire said. “The years of convincing people to lend their artworks.”
Astrid imagined Kandinsky’s mind, spread out all over the world, and then gathered together. Everyone having only a piece of the puzzle. Only in a show like this could you see the complete picture, stack the pieces up, hold them to the light, see how it all fit together. It made her hopeful, like someday her life would make sense too, if she could just hold all the pieces together at the same time.
They went back twice a week for the rest of the summer. Claire bought Astrid oil pastels so she could work in color without making the guards nervous. They would spend all day in a single room, looking at one picture. She had never done that before. A composition from 1913 presaged the First World War. “He was very sensitive. He could tell it was coming,” Claire said. The blackness, the cannons, wild, a mood so violent and dark, of course he had to invent abstraction.
The return to Russia. The exuberance of the avant-garde, but the darkening suspicion that it was coming to a close, even as it was flowering. On to the Bauhaus in the twenties. Straight lines, geometric forms. You didn’t let yourself go in times like that. You tried to find some underlying structure. Astrid understood him perfectly. Finally, the move to Paris. Pinks and blues and lavenders. Organic forms again, for the first time in years. What a relief Paris must have been, the color, the ability to be soft again.
Astrid wondered how she would paint her times. Shiny cars and wounded flesh, denim blue and zigzagged dog teeth, bits of broken mirror, fire and orange moons and garnet hearts.
And she figured out, finally, how she would finally get to sending out those postcards to her friends back in Fandom, which she'd put off so long she wondered if she should even really bother, but she had a nice new stack of postcards just begging to be filled.
To Sabine:
I've been really terrible about this whole keeping in touch thing, huh? Well, I've been spending most of my summer in a musuem, so I figured you can at least approve of that. There's this special exhibit by this guy named Kandinsky, I think you'd really find his work interesting. That's his work on the postcard, really abstract, too much for me at first, but I've really grown to appreciate what he does and especially his use of color.
Anyway, I'm trying not to think about having to go back to school, especially since the classes aren't nearly as fun here as they are there. But it sounds like you guys've had an interesting summer. I'd love to see more of your work depicting what's happened, those were really great! The walls of my bedroom are way too bare, anyway, and now the nice Durer rabbit that was there when I got there has some company.
I hope you're doing well, and if they stick you with a new roommate this fall, I hope they're not too bad.
Sincerely,
Astrid
To Mae:
A postcard of your drawings is so much better than just some dumb art print; I'd draw you one in response, but we've been going to this art exhibit at the museum by this guy named Kandinsky, and I didn't really like him at first, but he's really starting to grow on me and I thought I'd send everyone one of the pieces that have been inspiring me lately. The past isn't weird for me, but, I mean, it's not the past for me either? My foster mom is an actress, though, or at least she's trying to be, and my foster dad works on a TV show, so we go to a lot of places and there's famous people there, but it's weird because they don't seem like famous people, they just seem like normal people, they're a lot smaller and more plain than you'd think. It's way weirder than when I went to parties with my mom, because people don't usually know what to expect with artists and poets and writers, but with celebrities you expect stuff.
I don't know, it's weird, and I guess I'm rambling, and postcards aren't good for rambling, there isn't enough space. I guess we both have that problem.
Sabine sent me some pictures of the some of the crazy things going on out there this summer. I'd like to see some of your takes on it, too, if you could. You don't have to, but if you did, I'll definitely take you starlet watching sometime.
Also, I'd love to see all the weird old art in Possum Springs, too.
-Astrid.
For Norman:
nevermind about the VCR. Ron said that if you want to see the show, you'll have to wait until it airs, and I don't think I could really explain to him about time travel and multiple dimensions. But it's the thought that counts? Sorry it sounds like the summer's been hectic, Sabine sent me some art of some of the stuff, but that was a while, and maybe things have calmed down. If anything, the next semester should be interesting, right? It's almost time for that, isn't it? You'll have to tell me how the welcome picnic goes. I'm definitely not getting one of those at Fairfax High.
Talk to you later,
Astrid.
[[ I have been picking at this post since pretty much the start of July, lol, but I finally DID IT. Whoo! Open for calls or letters or maybe even poking because you just so happen to be in early '90s Hollywood for whatever reason~~ First section cribbed heavily from Chapter 17 of White Oleander by Janet Fitch! ]]
no subject
There was a definite emphasis on the Mario world, because that was fun to draw.
Dear Astrid,
Sorry it's been a while. It's been pretty crazy here. The island has mostly been trying to kill us lately, though we've had some off weeks. The other week was fun, though, like playing a game. Plus half the people in town had tails or frog suits. There was one week where everything was black and white, so I took off and went to Lana's world with her and Norman. That was interesting, and I got to see some Mandalorians, even if they're not exactly the way I'm used to. Also I was a bird again for a while, but Kanan and Hera let me stay on their ship during that, and I even got to do some painting in my room as a bird! I'm actually pretty proud of it.
Our room doesn't look much different, either. A lot of the stuff from this summer isn't something I want on the walls, so I haven't added a lot. I haven't touched your side at all, either. It would just feel weird.
Hope things are going well out there. What are the people like? I've looked up some stuff about Hollywood but I don't know how different it is from when you're from. Send pictures!
Promise I'll write sooner next time,
Sabine