#208: Fleck

Skye reaches for Josh’s hand. She absent-mindedly digs her fingernails across his paint-flecked skin.

He doesn’t resist, as he knows it worries her. She continues talking to him as tiny shards of paint peels off. There is a titanium white smeared along his index finger, but he doesn’t recall using it. It had been a productive day in the studio in the sense that time flew, but not in the sense that he worked on any one thing.

Josh goes over in his mind what he worked on, searching for when he used the titanium white.

At some point, he found a drawing of an ibis from an old National Geographic and loved the shaped formed by the bird’s elongated neck and outstretched wings. He recalls outlining the bird using charcoal, using it to fill in the blackness. On top of the wings, he mixed in cobalt green to give depth. And then, for the body, he smeared half a tube using the palette knife.

There was some excitement at the movement, but nothing on an intellectual level interested him in pursuing it any further.

“Josh,” Skye says.

He looked up from his hand. Her slate black eyes waiting for him to respond.

“Sorry,” he says.