Name: Elyse "Elysium" Kerr Occupation: (struggling) Fine Artist, part time clerk at Eden's Apple Age: 32 Sexuality: Bisexual Species: Human Hometown: Chicago, Illinois Relationship Status: In a relationship with @huntercam Personality Traits: Egotistical, stubborn, temperamental, creative, disciplined, determined.
Biography (tw mental health, drug use, sexual reference, exploitational artwork):
Aspire/Aspirate
It comes to you as easily as breathing. To want, to strive. For better and higher than beneath a fridge magnet. For a while, it's sufficient. It represents the pinnacle of achievement in your parents' eyes. It's not their fault their comprehension isn't deep enough for the work you create. You're the darling of their lives, your dreams encouraged no matter how little money they might make in the long run. It doesn't matter. They have money to spare as you aspire, aspirate, asphyxiate on your ambitions.
Ephemeral/Extemporal
College is a unique challenge for you. To learn and be humble, and yet assert your own value in a sea of peers who think their dreams are the same as yours. Peers is a generous word -- you find friends, inspirations, enemies among them. But rarely do you consider someone a peer, an equal. And yet, you consider yourself below the muse that inspires you. Without it, without her, you are throwing paint into empty space and hoping the something that takes shape has any semblance of value, meaning to the world. Your aspirations, inspirations, are fleeting. You spend the better part of your school years chasing them by any means necessary. Altering your mind, your flesh, desperately tearing at the veil over your eyes to see the world the way you know it should be. Moments are ephemeral, your plans extemporal. To catch the rabbit you have to move fast, live faster.
Elysium/Asylum
In your 20s, you find breakout success for a series of portraits you created to reflect the thin line between personhood and undoing of the flesh. They are called many things -- provocative, perverted, and disturbing are among your favorites. Good. Your work isn't meant to make others comfortable. The fruits of your still life class are beyond rotted now, festering and food for the flies. Painting idealism isn't your style. You would rather expose the flesh beneath the canvas, the parts that people are too afraid to see. Your parents are proud as they are worried. They don't understand -- they never did. But all that matters is your name on the gallery window. The name beneath your name. Elysium, you sign the work. A word meaning 'a place of happiness'. It's Greek, you're pretty sure. Asphodel, for the average death, the ones who never strove for perfection. Tartarus, for the vicious. Your work is not cruel, not malicious, though undoubtedly morbid. Wouldn't the souls of the Elysian Fields want the beauty of their afterlife put to the canvas? If poets could do it on paper, why not a painter, with oil and acrylic and blood?
The Hanged Man/The Hanging Man
What if it was all a mistake? You've spent years convincing yourself of your cleverness. That your perspective is unique, worth sharing with the world. But after that first gallery show, nothing comes again. You disappear into the studio, head down, letting the ephemeral world pass by while you simply aspirate. Create. Take a drink, have a smoke, find a muse and grab them fast. Rabbit punch them if you must. (You mustn't, but you would do it if the work required it.)
Nothing.
No one wants your work. You, too, start not to want your work. The rent is too high and your parents won't pay the bills any longer. You haven't sold a painting in months, and you're fairly certain the last you sold is being masturbated to in someone's studio apartment, dingy and dust-stained. Elysium is now a prison you've constructed for yourself in the shape of your rib cage fluttering, the heart beating and pounding for something, anything, to assure you this hasn't all been a waste of time.
It certainly doesn't come in the months after you move to Port Leiry, Oregon. You've been to the Pacific Northwest before, and you know what it's like to live in a tourist trap. But you are lured out with the promise of renewed creativity, another way to sustain yourself. Who promised it? You did, hoping you could make it true somehow. But the McCormick gallery, the only real semblance of fine art you can find in this place, rejects you. The owner does it personally, too. You're not sure if that makes you feel better or worse.
“I don’t sense any desire to prove yourself in these and you’re not sensing the beauty of the macabre— it feels as though you’re just doing this to shock. That’s not what my gallery is.”
You refuse to believe you're the one who misunderstands the art. He has photography of women anointed in bruises plastered to the walls of the gallery. Dark, delicate works of sketch art and oil and mixed media hung that evoke the stanch and scab of wounds picked over. Even still, demure things so far from your own style you wonder if you mistook the kind of man who ran this gallery.
So you go back to your flat, have a tantrum, a smoke, and a drink about it, and start anew. You crack the stretcher bars, unwind the canvas, and fold it into a corner. The beauty of the macabre. It has to be there somewhere -- you've perhaps got too much paint over your eyes to see it properly.
Until that night... like nature is beautiful, dark nature is darkly beautiful. You spot a creature of some kind wandering the streets of Port Leiry, the specifics of it you don't recall -- all you could witness was the emergence of something supernatural from the shadows. With a sharp glint of fangs, a life is taken in front of you and the beast disappears. You see the moonlight dancing drunk in the growing pool of blood on the pavement. And now, you understand. The purpose is not to shock, but to reveal slowly, layer by layer, another side of the world.
The gallery is the still goal, the aspiration, the obsession. You want payment, you want stability, and you want validation. But above it all, you want that place of goodness and comfort, even in death. You are building Elysium once more.
Wanted Plots / Connections
Taken Connection: The Muse Who Opened Her Eyes (Vampire/Werewolf) @lrivkin
You weren't careful. You didn't mean to. You let slip the masquerade. And now, Elysium dreams of you, their muse, the one who showed them the truth of Port Leiry. Will she recognize you when next you meet?
Buyers/Patrons for Their Art
Elysium does private commissions in addition to her personal/gallery works. She needs to make money somehow. But understand she doesn't do cheap works.
General: Friends, One Night Stands, People Who Appreciate Fine Art
Does what it says on the tin.
Taken Connection: Ex-Somebodies. They dated for a whirlwind of a year -- but they just weren't a match. Maybe it was something about the way they were both hiding behind fake names. Maybe it was something about the way Elyse wanted to scratch beneath the surface and make it bleed, while Rose wanted old wounds to heal over. Whatever happened, it didn't last. But Elyse knows the real truth of the world now, and that's something Annabelle couldn't hide from her forever. @rosexhalstead Taken Connection: The Master and Margarita. He's the devil. He's the Promethean fire and the eagle tearing out her liver. She wants nothing more than his validation -- does she admire him? worship him? hate him for impeding her artistic progress? Is he the sole reason she's making art these days? For better or worse, he's stoked a dark blaze inside of her and she's enthralled by watching herself burn. @huntercam
