Art for Art's Sake: Meredith's Story

by Barbara L. Clanton

  Art For Art's Sake: Meredith's Story

  Copyright © 2009 by Barbara L. Clanton

  Acknowledgments

  Dedication

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  About the Author

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  Art For Art's Sake: Meredith's Story

  by

  Barbara L. Clanton

  Copyright © 2009 by Barbara L. Clanton

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. Parts of this work are fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, or events is entirely coincidental.

  ISBN 978-1-935053-02-7-6 (eBook)

  eBook Conversion September 2011

  Cover design by Donna Pawlowski

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The characters, incidents and dialogue herein are fictional and any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

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  Regal Crest Enterprises, LLC

  4700 Hwy 365, Suite A, PMB 210

  Port Arthur, Texas 7764

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  Published in the United States of America

  Acknowledgments

  I must thank all of those kind people who took the time to give me their insights and suggestions on various drafts of Meredith’s Story. Special thanks go out to my editors at Regal Crest, Mary Phillips and J. Robin Whitley, for guiding me through another one. Thanks to Andi Marquette, Sheri Milburn, Angela Perkins, Lori Hood, Carmen Roldan, the Cathy’s, Amy Gamber, Diana Schnitzer, and my art experts Kymberly Moreland-Garnett and Irina Ashcraft. I naturally need to thank my parents, Paul and JoAnne Clanton, and my brothers Paul Clanton, Jr. and John Clanton and their respective families for their collective wisdom and support. Thanks also to my girl’s folks, Mamie and Joe Weathers, who continue to encourage me. Grandma and Grandpa, take care of Shasta, Cody, Piglet, and Kisha and thanks for your unconditional love through every phase of my life. And thanks, finally, to my foundation, Jackie Weathers, who pretends to understand why I spend so much time with my computer.

  Dedication

  For my parents, Paul and JoAnne Clanton, who always put their children first. You encouraged me in everything I tried, and you let me learn my own life lessons, sometimes the hard way. Thanks for signing up to be my parents.

  Art For Art's Sake: Meredith's Story

  by

  Barbara L. Clanton

  Chapter One

  The Outcast

  ALL EYES WERE on her. Meredith Bedford cleared her throat and looked up from her notes. She coughed into her fist to hide her nerves. The other students in the classroom snickered. She heard someone say, “Freak.” Another said, “Loser.” Words. They were just words. Words she had heard a thousand times before. She sat up a little straighter at her desk in the back of Mr. Dalton’s history classroom, pushed her black-rimmed glasses up the bridge of her nose, and said tentatively, “They probably thought the capital should have been New York City.”

  Ben Kinsey sat two seats in front of her, but in the next row over. He coughed into his hand and said, “Retard.”

  Meredith sighed softly and looked out the windows of the second-floor classroom. The gray January cold seeped through the glass and wrapped itself around her. Her long black wavy hair fell around her face and efficiently hid her from view. She knew her cheeks were turning a bright shade of crimson, but that was okay because blushing added color to her winter pale skin, and no one would see her blush behind her hair fortress, anyway.

  Dani Lassiter, senior class president, whacked her friend Ben in the arm and told him to shut up. Meredith smiled and began another doodle in the margin of her notes. She was glad Dani stuck up for her. Dani had always been friendly, but Meredith knew that Dani, like the rest of them, would never give her the time of day, so Meredith pretty much ignored Dani like she ignored everybody else. Meredith couldn’t wait to get out of high school. She had one more semester to go and then she would shrug off these people like an old coat and move on.

  Mr. Dalton nodded in her direction. “Meredith, that was a good answer. A lot of people did think New York City should have been the capital of the state instead of Albany. And many people still think that.” He directed his next question to the entire class. “Now, people, why do you think they wanted New York City? Albany sits on the Hudson River just like New York does.”

  Meredith kept her eyes down as always because most teachers didn’t notice you if you did that. Mr. Dalton was on to this trick, though, because he called on people who didn’t have their hands raised. That didn’t seem fair. Meredith knew he was trying to draw her out of her shell or something, but she really didn’t want to be drawn out. Her plans were to wait until college, that’s when she would come out of her shell. That’s when no one would know her or Mikey and she could start her whole life over. She was done with the jerks at Whickett High School.

  “Mr. Kinsey,” Mr. Dalton directed the question to Ben. “Why New York City?”

  Ben threw his pen down on his blue spiral notebook, leaned back, and put his hands in the pockets of the oversized army jacket he wore every day, no matter what the weather. His short brown hair was unkempt as usual. Meredith wondered if the blue spiral was the only notebook he owned because she never saw him with a book bag.

  “Well, Mr. Dalton, it’s obvious,” Ben replied confidently. “People thought the capital should be where the Statue of Liberty was.” The class burst into collective laughter at Ben’s answer.

  “Mr. Kinsey,” Mr. Dalton said with a grin. “You have a textbook, don’t you?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Well, I suggest you read it once in a while.” He held his hands out to the class as if conducting an orchestra. “People, all together now, when was Albany made the capital of New York State?”

  The collective response was, “1797.”

  “And when did France give the United States the Statue of Liberty?”

  “1885.”

  “Oh, almost a hundred years later. Mr. Kinsey, I suggest you brush up on your dates. This course is called ‘The History of New York State,’ not ‘The Fiction of New York State,’ and I’m sure I don’t need to remind you, Ben, but your semester exam is on Tuesday.”

  Ben nodded and sank lower in his chair. He ran a hand over his hair to smooth his cowlick, which didn’t work, and then jammed his hands into his jacket pockets.

  Mr. Dalton directed his next comments to the entire class. “New York City, as all of you remember, was this great nation’s first capital for about twelve years. So although New York City may have been the capital of the country, it never was the capital of the state.” He nodded in Ben’s di
rection. Ben nodded back.

  Meredith liked Mr. Dalton. She even thought he was handsome with his thick black mustache and short black hair cut close around his ears. He was probably still in his twenties, but he was very much in command of the class. Mr. Dalton was one of the few teachers who seemed to hear the hateful words constantly thrown her way, and he had probably embarrassed Ben in retribution for harassing her. Although she was grateful that he tried to defend her, she didn’t like the extra attention it brought.

  STEPPING INTO MRS. Levine’s sanctuary always helped Meredith shake off the rest of the school day. Bright and inspirational posters of works by Rembrandt, Monet, Cassatt, and Warhol covered the walls. Mrs. Levine had a strict rule about book bags in her art room, so Meredith placed hers in her assigned cubby. She could muddle through her other classes, but art was the one and only class of the day she actually enjoyed. She was grateful to Mrs. Levine for recommending her for Advanced Placement Studio Art. AP Art was a lot of work, but in that class she was free, mostly, from the daily taunts and jeers of her classmates. The other nine students in the class pretty much left her alone. They were too busy with their own work to be bothered with her. Plus, a mutual respect seemed to exist among the artists, like honor among thieves. She had forty-three minutes to forget about the world before the long walk home in the frigid temperatures with her brother, Mikey.

  Meredith lived for Thursdays because for the next two days Mrs. Levine let them work on whatever project they wanted, and Meredith planned to work on Mikey’s portrait. She had to use a photograph of him, of course, because he simply could not sit still long enough for her to get anything on canvas. Meredith had taken his picture during Whickett Days the spring before, and she liked the way his face was contorted with effort during his karate demonstration. Since facial expressions were the focus of her required AP Art concentration, she hoped this particular portrait would become part of her AP portfolio. She desperately hoped she could capture the intensity on his face. Meredith chuckled softly at the image. His tongue was sticking out, as usual. Typical Mikey.

  Meredith had made a preliminary drawing of Mikey in her sketchbook with colored pencils, so she had a good idea how she wanted to approach the portrait with her acrylics. Sketching always helped her get a feel for her subject.

  She pulled the rubber band off her wrist and raked her waves of jet-black hair into a bundle. She twirled the rubber band around her hair to keep it off her face and out of her eyes. She hid behind her hair most of the day, but in art, she was free. She didn’t care who saw her face. Her mother told her the acne scars on her cheeks weren’t that bad. Meredith wanted to believe her, but she wasn’t completely convinced. Since she needed to see her artwork clearly, she didn’t let herself think about it.

  She pulled Mikey’s canvas from the rack and walked back to her easel. She retrieved her plastic box of paints and brushes from her cubby and pulled her palette out of the box. When she painted portraits, she usually made a general pencil outline of the person, to get a feel for the size of the subject on the canvas. Then before painting facial features or other details, she concentrated on the clothing. Painting the clothing first usually let her get comfortable with her subject and pretty much took up the first session if she had an actual person sitting for her.

  After costuming, she liked to work from the inside out. She would sketch the eyes, nose, and mouth with pencil and then, only once she was satisfied, would she attempt to paint the features. Facial features were, in her opinion, the most important part of the person. She had painted enough portraits to believe that the eyes were, indeed, the link to the soul. The mouth, too, was crucial in conveying expressions.

  She assessed what she had done last week with her brother’s mouth. She nodded in satisfaction. Yes, she had certainly captured the intensity on his face, especially in the way he pursed his lips, but she needed to move on to hair day. She liked to think of the hair as an extension of the face so she planned to draw in the general shape of the hair, paint in the first layer, use slightly different shades for shadow, and then add in a few lines for texture. She needed to capture the sunlight that came from behind his head, so later she would feather in the lighter colors of his dark brown hair. In real life, Mikey’s hair was unruly and she toyed with the idea of combing it for him in the portrait, but decided that, no, Mikey was Mikey, and the world was going to get him as his usual disheveled self. With that firmly decided, she went about selecting tubes from her box of paints and placed them near her palette.

  “Ah,” Mrs. Levine said knowingly from behind her. “Hair day?”

  Meredith smiled at her art teacher. “Yeah. I think I’ve got the right colors.”

  “Looks like it.” Mrs. Levine nodded and smiled with her eyes. “Combed or wild?”

  Meredith laughed. “I’m going for the natural look, so wild it is.”

  “Go for it. Holler if you need me.” Mrs. Levine moved on to her next student. Although Thursdays and Fridays were free days, it didn’t mean you could goof off. Mrs. Levine always made sure everyone worked productively.

  Meredith wished she could carry herself as confidently as her art teacher. Mrs. Levine wore her highlighted blond hair in a bun, but the old-fashioned hairstyle didn’t make Mrs. Levine look old, it just made her look professional or business-like. Meredith wished she could keep her hair up all the time, but that would be way too much exposure. Her art teacher’s forest green smock was spattered with various paint colors and Meredith wondered if the paint had come from student projects or from her teacher’s own artwork. Probably both.

  Meredith pushed her glasses up the bridge of her nose and looked at the portrait of her brother. As she pencil-sketched his hair, she thought about him. She didn’t want to blame her troubles on him, but she couldn’t help it sometimes. With a brother like Mikey, she couldn’t help getting noticed too which was the last thing she wanted. She knew that most people, including her classmates, thought that if Mikey was the way he was, then maybe she had a touch of it, too.

  Meredith squeezed out an inch of raw sienna onto her palette and then a half-inch of white. She mixed them together with her palette knife. Pleased with the results, she picked up her flat brush and dabbed it into her newly created color. She pushed up her glasses again and imagined the brush strokes she would use, sort of like a dress rehearsal. She took the plunge and used broad strokes to simulate his hair. She leaned back and nodded. Yes, the color was perfect. Too bad other aspects of her life weren’t so perfect.

  Her parents decided to move from Greenspond, a small mountain town in the Catskill Mountains of central New York, to the sprawling suburbs of Albany a year and a half ago, just before Meredith entered the eleventh grade. If she had stayed in Greenspond, her graduating class could have fit into two minivans, but her parents felt that Mikey needed better opportunities for schooling so off to Albany they went.

  She missed Greenspond terribly. She had friends there. Not that many, but at least she had a few and wasn’t the pariah there that she was at Whickett High School. At Whickett, she had absolutely no friends. Her classmates had not gone out of their way to welcome the new girl. In the beginning, Meredith tried desperately to shed her introverted nature. She worked up the courage to talk to some of the other kids in her classes, but after too many tear-filled nights, she gave up and locked herself away in the art room and stayed there. It was easier to be invisible.

  Meredith slashed her brush across the canvas. She pulled the brush back in horror, her eyes focused wide on the painting. She breathed a sigh of relief. The portrait was okay. She couldn’t believe that here, in her sanctuary, she had let those Whickett jerks intrude. Ben, Dani, and all those others, they could fall into the polluted Hudson River for all she cared. She closed her eyes and took a deep breath. She held it for a moment.

  “What’s up, kiddo?” Mrs. Levine was on her second trip around the room.

  Meredith felt her face flush. “Oh, sorry. I just let the world intrude for a s
econd.”

  “That happens to me, too, sometimes. Just breathe and let it go.” She looked over Meredith’s painting for a moment and then continued, “Since you’re taking a break anyway, I wanted to talk to you about the Senior Art Elective class second semester. Now, I know you probably don’t need the credits to graduate, but I thought if you had room in your schedule sixth period you could take the course.”

  “Really?” Meredith was overjoyed. She didn’t know she could take a second art course. “Yes, yes! A thousand times, yes. I have a study hall during sixth period now.” Wow. Two periods of art out of eight. The day had just improved tenfold.

  “I know you have extra responsibilities at home,” her teacher gestured at the portrait in progress, “so I figured you could use the extra time to work on your AP portfolio. Of course, I’ll require some kind of project from you for the elective course. Probably something to exhibit for Whickett Days in May.”

  “We went to Whickett Days last year. That was a lot of fun.”

  “I know. It’s small town stuff, but the Whickett townspeople love to celebrate their history.” She smiled. “Okay, Meredith, I’ll put your name on my list and hand it in today.” Mrs. Levine turned to walk away, but then looked back. “I thought you might jump at the chance.”

  Meredith smiled. Now she was in the right frame of mind to work on Mikey’s bad hair day. Once she was satisfied with the first go-around with Mikey’s hair, she put the still-wet painting carefully in the rack, stored her supplies, and retrieved her book bag. When the bell rang to end the school day, she headed for her locker before picking up Mikey at his sixth grade classroom in the middle school. Students jostled for position in the crowded hallways, but thankfully, no one noticed her and she changed out her books easily. Meredith closed her locker just as Dani Lassiter opened hers. The senior lockers were randomly placed around the school and for some reason Meredith’s locker was just three away from Dani’s.