There was a painting she stared at for hours every day. The colors seeping through the canvas was a blend of green and blue, the leaves, the placid river, the obligatory red-brown house by the water...A commonplace thing, an ordinary landscape, so perfect it was sickening.
Every piece of creation has a soul - at least that's what she believed. A painting is more than the sum of its components. A single brushstroke tells multiple stories - from the depth, the slur, the light , the color, and the spaces. A sentence is more than the sum of its words. All works of art reveal facets of the person who created them.
But this painting was soulless, faceless. She tried to see it through others' eyes, to understand what they saw in it. And realized from their superficial admiration of the skill and technique that they too saw nothing. Like the clean lines of machine-cut wood, that boasts the power of well-handled power tools but showing no signs of fatigue and sweat. Antiseptic.
It was the silence of the painting that she couldn't take. A picture that did not fight but allowed itself to be trapped within the edges of low-grade paper to be stared at by pathetic people with no taste. So she stole it.
Paintings are supposed to be mirrors. And you need a mirror to see whether the picture you painted is true to what you've desired. Maybe that's why people who stare too long will finally go insane looking at infinite reflections for a glimpse of their soul or lack thereof. Mirrors after all deceive through amplification, illusion and distortion. And some lose lustre, become toxic or corrode.
So she had to steal it. Hide it from view. Perhaps she will bury it, crush it or do a Dorian Gray on it. Maybe then the veils will fall and reveal the reason for the silence.
