🖋 + art
Fenna’s parents always did appreciate art, don’t get me wrong. They wanted their children to visit museums and know about the biggest artists and understand the different styles --- partly because they really did value art, but mostly because they enjoyed to flaunt their knowledge and prestige. ( Look at how cultured we are! Hur dur dur --- Fenna’s parents, probably. )
They also liked to flaunt their wealth. Furniture from Rietveld, a Mondrian on their wall, a Karel Appel piece in the kitchen, you name it --- Fenna’s father, especially, loved showing all their art pieces off to guests.
So, really, art was mostly there to appreciate and to use as a tool. It was no career option. That much was clear.
Fenna loved those museums she went to deeply, unlike her siblings, who preferred the gift shops and the dinners afterwards. Picture this: a small blonde, standing in front of a Vermeer for twenty minutes, undisturbed my the tourists. Mouth and eyes wide open. Another image: a young Fenna reaching the top floor of the Van Gogh museum, which is dedicated to his death, and bursting into tears among strangers.
Later, when she knows she is an artist herself, she understands. She reads his letters and cries, again, but less freely than she had once done.
She has always drawn. Since she was able to pick up a pencil, she has drawn. As Fenna grew older, she fell more and more in love with the way she could put anything onto paper ----- it gave her a sense of freedom. She started painting at some point, too, asked for pastels and oil paints for her tenth birthday and saw frustration on her mother’s face when her clothes started to get oil pain stains that were a struggle to get out. ( She didn’t care about such messiness, if she were honest. )
And she’s good. She knows she’s good --- even if she struggles to say that and show it. She has good technique, has developed her own style over the years, knows how to play with light and angles and perspective. As Fenna became better and older, she also grew more interested in and inspired by other artists --- smaller ones, younger ones, not just the classic artists her parents liked. Ones that would make her parents shake with a bit of shock.
Art is her way out. Her saviour. Her escape plan. The world is ugly, so she paints a prettier one. The world is ugly, so she paints it with all its flaws. Her insecurities look better on canvas than they do in her head. Her fears are more easily accepted when she puts them down in her sketchbook. She draws and paints and knows that without it, she wouldn’t be able to breathe.
And so it’s what she wants to do, later. She wants to go to art school. She wants to study art and be taught art and learn and grow and do this forever and ever and do nothing else at all. Her parents don’t like it ( but they don’t like a lot about her, it seems, and while she can’t make peace with that, she does know that it’s not her fault by now ), but it’s the only thing that makes sense. The world is terrifying and confusing, but when charcoal hits her sketchbook, it makes a bit more sense.
( NB: Fenna doesn’t only paint and draw. She writes, too, but that’s more private, something for secret notebooks. Endless poems about her mind and her fears and the rattlesnakes in her stomach, scribbled down quickly. She plays piano, too --- another part of her cultural upbringing, but feels less creative freedom there. This she doesn’t mind; she likes following the notes on sheet music and recreating a sound someone else invented quite a lot. )
