Dear LIT Readers, however many you are,
I decided to try my hand at a longer story with an ongoing line of events. Since I’m an artist living in a small New England town with many remnants of its failed industrial heritage in evidence, it seemed like an apt setting for a longer story. The invention of “The Art Factory”, a large industrial complex converted to live/work space for artists is not unique to New England or many other cities in the states, for that matter. But it did seem like a befitting structure to support a cluster of characters and their related stories. Let me know what you think as the story evolves. Voting and feedback are the most effective way to do that.
I’ll respond. And if someone has more to say, I’ll get back to you through E-mail.
Thanks and enjoy.
L O Reins
“The Art factory” Part 1: “Althea, The Painter”
Althea Rodez stepped back from the painting she had been working on for the last three weeks. The abstract painting took up four 8-foot square canvasses that ran most of the length of the long windowless wall of her studio. Her paints, in pails and her assortment of large, soft brushes were spread out down the stretch of cotton drop cloths that covered the floor in front of the painting. There were buckets and smaller cans of colors, solvent cans, rags and two stepladders, one three feet high and the other six feet. This was the last of three days of mostly staring and making small changes in her painting. It was finally done. The acrylic paints were on her clothes, in her hair, on her hands. It felt good. She felt alive when she painted inside like this--so much more private than the mural work. Alone with the studio thermostat set high the way she liked it when she painted indoors. No gawkers, no earnest compliments, no silly questions. She felt intoxicated from the heat of the loft and the fumes of the paint but even more from the hypnotic act of reaching inside herself to work with her pigments and canvas. She loved working at this scale. The afternoon light from the windowed wall behind her basked the studio and the canvases in a crisp white with just a tint of the oranges and pinks that came in that hour before sunset. .
Althea kicked off her clogs, quickly undid the straps of her coveralls, let them drop around her ankles. She stripped off her tee shirt. The studio felt hot and humid to Althea, the air thick with the aroma of latex and acrylics. She felt dreamy and intensely focused as she stepped back from her painting. It was beautiful, vibrant and alive and swamped in the deluge of emotions she had been working with for the past weeks. Her color pallet was visceral, thick rich tones and shades of what she called life colors. Her forms were voluptuous and sumptuous--large rolling masses of shape and color; shadowed pockets and deep crevices, and to a much lesser degree, thin elongated hard lines and edges. Though abstracted these forms suggesting the organic shapes of life.
As if in a trance she bent at the knee and dropped her hands, to above her elbows, into the warm thick paint in the two joint compound buckets at her sides. A rich yellow ocher and a muted eggplant of a black, these were two of her staple of basics that she had mixed in larger quantities. She drew her arms up out of the buckets as she stood to full height. There was a thick plopping sound as the paint ran down her arms and back into the reservoirs. Althea caressed her thighs with her syrupy coated hands, drew them slowly up the sides of her abdomen, together at her soft tummy and finally up and under her breasts. She brushed them up over her now engorged nipples as she locked her powerful leg muscles and turned her pelvis. Her hands continued their slithering journey to the back of her neck and up past her ears to come together, left hand grasping her right wrist. Pulled tight as if bound and drawn up over her head, she reached and locked her joints into a languid stretch that freed all the tensions built up from the close concentration of the days work.
She turned around facing the narrow wall of windows. Althea relaxed, dropping her arms and slowly lifted her left leg, toes pointing over the rich thick surface of the ochre. The ball of her foot and her pretty toes just rested on its surface. She slipped into the warm yellow brown all the way to the top of her calve, the chilled paint tickling the sensitive flesh behind her knee. It felt cold and squishy between her toes. She reached down into the pool of golden mud and drew it up to mid-thigh like a nylon stocking. She padded over to the other pails. The feeling of the thick paint squishing between her toes sent a tingle through her pussy. Althea lifted the smaller pail of vivid red from the drop cloth. She dipped her fingers into the thick ooze and swiped her finger through her nether lips and swooned at the sensations. Now her right arm and her left leg were ochre and her left arm was black. And her lovely pussy was a gashing swipe of corvette red.
