sebastian volek, district three

art is my heartbeats and my breaths of air; it is what i live for.

with the flick of my paintbrush, i create stories portrayed on a stretch of canvas. smears of vibrant colors blended together, precise lines, paint splatters, tiny tiny details from a tiny tiny brush, all create a perfect image, an expression of thought and feeling, onto a single, blank canvas.

there is no beauty greater than the beauty of creation.

it still amazes me, the power that human hands possess. the world rests at their fingertips, stretching out endlessly, an everlasting mystery yet to be discovered. they could brush across paper with watercolors, they could slide a pen along parchment, they could chip stone away until it resembles something else. the possibilities trail on and on, just as the star-filled sky does.

i follow my heart like the north star, a scintillating point of hopeful light the in sea of darkness. and it led me straight to buckets of paint and old, barren canvases, all of which once belonged to my mother (she must have passed her nimble artist hands down to me), sitting idly by to rot in the basement. it led me straight to oil pastels, which i grasped with my tiny child hands and scribbled a mural, alive with every color in the spectrum, all across the pristine white wall of my bedroom.

my mother walked into the room to gather me for dinner, and dropped her glass of wine in utter shock on the clean carpets, sending a dark crimson spill pooling onto the fabric. i remember seeing the anger spark in her eyes, horrified that i had stained her perfect white walls with cartoons of narwhals and v shapes of ivory birds and cerulean skies that nearly matched the crystal ocean.

but her anger subsided when she saw how beautiful it was - or, at least, beautiful for something stemmed from the hands of a ten-year-old. she knew i was an artist, but she did not know that talent flowed through my fingers like rivers, that art came as easily to me as breathing.

i paint nearly everything that exists on this earth; for every landscape, every blazing gold sunset, every coast of midnight blue, every face, can be imitated by a collection of pigments on canvas and morphed into a masterpiece by capable hands. but human faces are my favorite. i paint them as often as i can, to challenge myself. (get the lines of the cheekbones just right . . . oh, and the nose, right on center . . . eyes just a bit higher . . . .) there is no greater challenge in art than placing the face of a human onto paper.

my most prized portrait is of myself, and not because of any narcissism i harbor. the painting is truly a masterpiece, most likely due to the availability of a mirror i could glance into between soft strokes of paint. everything had fallen into place as perfectly as if they were puzzle pieces.

the face is tilted to gaze at something out of sight - perhaps, the sunset blazing in the skies, around him. the receding sunlight catches the lighter streaks in his thick dark hair that seems ruffled by gusts of winds. the sharp planes of his long face, prominent beneath light golden skin (a gift from the sun itself), are illuminated by the soft fiery glow of the sun. the shape of his jawline is defined by the dark shadow that is cast below it and there is the slightest darkness in the hollows of his cheeks, where the sinking sun does not touch.

his eyes are so deep-set, there are shadows around his eyes, and the dark eyelashes that fringe his eyes brush against his brow bone. the two dark factors bring out the intensity of his eyes, the color of pale sapphires. they are a pair of centers of a hurricanes. frozen on canvas, they seethe with spiraling storm clouds and coruscate with blinding lightning - sometimes i can hear the deafening crackle roar in my ears like a battle cry.

perhaps the eyes reflect what is inside, what is beneath the surface of icy calm. i can be an unyielding storm with merciless, whipping winds and low growls of thunder and blasts of jagged lightning. all it takes is shattering the thick shield of ice and the gates of hell will open its great mouth into an endless void, consuming anything that dare oppose it.

and once my mind is made up, my decision is engraved in stone, etched too deep to fade. in flashing red flurries of anger, mercy is nonexistent; the word itself is alien, a stranger to the ears. i have been known for kindness and gentleness among those who hold my heart. but never before have i been characterized as merciful, especially not in the midst of furry, in the eye of my hurricane of rage.

a word of advice from yours truly: don't break the ice.