The View From The Window

by Sunchaser

The Golden Road

The View From The Window
Original: The Golden Road

As often happened upon completing a dreamscape, the last thing Reverie wanted to do afterward was paint.

It wasn't just that her own dreams had been stolen away, replaced by the inexorable endurance of other ponies' clandestine fantasies and undisclosed desires. It was also being forced to then either commit them to canvas, or suffer them never leaving her mind - and thus having her ability as a painter be exploited in turn.

One might imagine that she was left somewhat disgruntled after such an affair. It would vary in intensity, of course, depending on what sort of dream it ended up being, but the end result was always the same: for days - occasionally weeks - afterward, Reverie could not stand so much as the idea of picking up a brush.

She was not an overly outgoing mare by nature - it was difficult to be so, you see, when one's professional reputation ranged between brilliant visionary artist and mentally disturbed pornographer? With both the public adulation and condemnation to match - and so it happened that Reverie didn't exactly get out all that much. She was accordingly somewhat lacking in an at-hoof social circle in which to take comfort.

But when staying home meant she could do little but be reminded...

The virtue of necessity had turned even this post-artistic fatigue state to its particular advantages. This was time she always spent out of the apartment; taking in everyday sights, enjoying lovely sunlit moments in parks, lazily dozing above rainclouds, or even just doing some idle shopping now and then. While her painting career wasn't quite padding her wallet enough to be dropping bits at say, Hoity Toity, she still had what she considered a comfortable disposable income.

That was how she had spent the past four days. A few cafe lunches, some park afternoons, a trip to refresh her grocery stock following her return from the city - her dwindled tea stash in particular. She'd even splurged, just once and with a touch of guiltiness, on a new sun dress and matching summer hat. But they had been on sale, after all, what with Equestria scheduled to come into autumn next week.

This new sun dress and its accompanying hat she now wore, as she set down her field kit on the grassy hill overlooking the southern Lengthy Island shore. It was still a touch chilly, being only a little less than an hour past dawn - far too cool for just a sun dress, one would typically say - but the fluffy down of her wings, in addition to her inherent pegasus nature, allowed Reverie to easily shrug off the temperature.

This same tolerance would not apply to her paints, however, which were likely to be rather less cooperative than usual out here on the breezy shore. Hopefully being left in the sun for a while would warm them up, so that she could then capture that same sun reflecting off the wavetops when it hit the right spot.

She could have done it from memory if she'd ended up having to wait for another day, of course. That had been the original idea to begin with - she'd sketched the scene on her way to Manehatten for her recent showing, excited by the beautiful sparkling waves, the way they made the golden light shimmer and dance...

But that sketch had ended up too attached to the events of that trip, and while it was by no fault of its own, such relations all too easily distorted the original feeling of the piece.

And so, now that she'd taken these past four days to distance herself from her most recent vision, once she'd again felt refreshed and ready to tackle a portrait without any shadows tugging at the edges, she'd gathered her kit and walked the early morning Mareford roads off to the south shore, so she could recapture the image directly.

Though it was notably cooler than ten days' previous, the weather was essentially the same, and Princess Celestia's timing was reliable as ever.

So Reverie delved into her kit, and dragged out her weighted easel, popping it open and setting it on the grass. She set her blank canvas upon it and secured it in place with the attached snaps, and then she dug out her collection of travel paints, and placed them on top of the carrying bag to soak up some sun and warm up.

Then, Reverie pulled from the bag one other thing - a small lacquered wooden case that was popped open to reveal lightly sugared strawberries - and she casually snacked while the sun rose above the horizon and edged toward the desired height.

It was midway through biting into the third of these cool, sweet fruits that a thought occurred to Reverie. A thought that, upon reflection, she was surprised had not made itself known at some earlier point over the preceding four days.

This was the sudden realization that, in retrospect, her most recent vision had been very much different from the usual.

It had been...well, the common sort of dream to see, the standard fare of somepony's unspoken sexual desires. She'd seen these commonly enough over the years that they didn't even make her blush anymore - regardless of the fact that this sort of vision always involved the dreams of ponies she knew. Often not personally or even socially, but she was typically acquainted with them, or at least could place the name and face from some local event. They were always local - short range, as she'd come to think of it.

The less common sort of vision was the heavier, harsher kind. Imaginings of dark intent: revenge plots, domination fantasies, sinister manipulations, deep-seated inclinations to violence...but these were rare, and never featured ponies she knew. She thought - and hoped, a little - that they were long range visions, distant thoughts that carried on their greater strength of emotion.

Her most recent vision broke these patterns. In content it was the common, short-ranged sort, but in subject it was most certainly the latter, having hailed from very far afield indeed.

And though Reverie didn't know the subjects of the dream, she was at least aware of who Twilight Sparkle was, if only from the newspaper pages she'd seen covering the Bearers of Harmony. There was that medal ceremony in Canterlot about a year ago, after the whole Discord debacle (for Manehatten's part, the whimsical draconequus had suffused Lengthy Island Sound with chocolate milk via a transformed Hoofson River), and there had been the matter of the Grand Galloping Gala only a few weeks previous that had consumed the social pages for days on end, and then of course the whole royal release upon the return of Princess Luna two years ago...

Through these things, she had learned enough of Twilight Sparkle to know that she was a resident of Ponyville, south of Canterlot in central Equestria. And Reverie was on the north-eastern seaboard!

Just how had a...well, run of the mill carnal fantasy made such a lengthy trip? Who so intensely yearned for Twilight Sparkle that Reverie had caught their dream from half the country away?

But then Reverie's eyes were caught by flashes of dancing golden light off the wavetops to the south, and thus those thoughts were put aside for possible later contemplation. A quick comparison to memory placed the sun at perhaps twenty minutes short of ideal position, and the following check of her paints found that yes, the sun had warmed them as hoped. Not to their usual easy thinness, perhaps, but easily enough to be usable.

So she took up her wide-stroke one-inch fan brush between her teeth, dabbed it into the light blue, and began filling in expanses of clear sky to begin to warm up and pass the intervening time. This roughing in of the sky over the top half of the canvas - especially with her mildly disobedient paints - ended up taking a fair few minutes, and then the brush was washed and dipped a little more lightly into the darker blue that she needed less of for the comparatively smaller section of cool ocean surface.

With a reference glance with an eye to solar ascendance, Reverie was quickly brushing in the more nuanced section of waves, the deeper blue thinning on the right side where the distant east coast would soon be dabbed in. The rough ocean was finished in only a minute or two, and after a thorough washing, the fan brush was put aside and switched for the half-inch angle brush, which was generously dipped into the green and then applied to the empty bottom of the canvas that would soon be filled with grasses, trees, and other detailed foliage.

The distant east coast would run up the side of the canvas on the right...so a collection of bushes and small trees nearer the viewpoint would rise up the left, forming a visual bowl that guided the eyes out onto the central ocean. It wasn't strictly accurate to the actual scenery, Reverie noted, her brushwork half-consciously sprouting grasses and outlining bushes in single strokes, but then the original had been seen from a train window while further inland, twenty miles to the west.

Another reference glance, and the angle brush was washed and dipped into the brown paint, to quickly rough in the missing eastern coastline and complete the backdrop...and then the canvas was suddenly something more than it had been. Fifteen minutes earlier it had been blank white cloth, and now, for all its blurry lack of detail and flat swaths of single color, it was identifiably a portrait of some distant vista.

The detailing of the waves, rocky coast, and windswept brush would have to wait, though, as the sun now approached its reflective zenith for the focus of the morning piece.

Reverie washed her half inch angle brush and clicked her teeth around the handle of her quarter-inch round, carefully dipping only its tip into the white, and then she began the process: long, intense stares at the shimmering golden reflections of the southern waves, until the image was driven deep into her mind, and light sweeps of the brush tip to place those distant flashes of perfect brilliance onto the ocean surface on the canvas.

There was no thought to the cold breeze still blowing in from the northeast, no guilt about having spent good bits on a summer dress at which that cool wind tugged, a dress she would be able to wear for perhaps all of three weeks before the weather turned. No worrying about the sugared strawberries she'd forgotten to cover up again, so lost as she'd become in her earlier introspection.

There was only the view and the brush.

Comments

[Seether00]

Again, please get someone to create pictures! Your words, while eloquent, are not enough.

[Dusty Sage]

I'm seeing the pictures already, with a clarity I didn't anticipate. (Obviously I spent too much time as a foal in art class.)

[Avenging-Hobbits]

I need to see these as actual paintings please

[Bradel]

First of all, I went back and read Shameful Reflection again (the scene, not the chapter). Well. Well, well, well.

I think I know who it is now, but it's truly stunning how well that works for both of them. There are cues for Rarity that I missed, but there are some things I'd consider very significant clues for Celestia as well. And then there are the clues that apply so well to both. The little sister to whom this mysterious mare doesn't want to have to explain herself? The pearly white coat? Very interesting indeed. Out of curiosity, did that come about by design or by happenstance? I'm guessing happenstance – I know you're clever, but that'd be some impressive reader-leading for your second chapter of your first fic here. Then again, who am I to talk? That feels like the sort of thing I might dream up (and I'm looking at you, Iain M. Banks' Use of Weapons), and I haven't been writing here a particularly long time.

In any case, happenstance or design, it's still great stuff. But let's move on to "The Golden Road"!

I'm probably not going to be quite so lucid here. Turns out I'm doing this slightly too late in the day for myself, and I started drifting off to sleep when the painting hit. That's a shame, because I do like your descriptions of the process. They are perhaps more detailed than necessary, but they're also a window into a world I don't know – although as an amateur photographer, I can relate very well to the idea of getting oneself in place to capture the image when the light is right. Transient weather and lighting effects are how I've gotten pretty much all of my best work.

Shameless self-bump: fc05.deviantart.net/fs28/i/2008/203/2/7/Sunrise_at_Moeraki_by_Yakaji.jpg

There's not quite as much going on here as there was in Chapter 2. I really did like that train station scene. But the insight into how Reverie's talent works is a welcome thing, and I'm very much a fan of the small touches you use to give your story more texture. Case in point, the strawberries. There's no structural reason for their inclusion. At least the sun dress serves some purpose, giving us a window on Reverie's personality through her buying habits and her fashion. I don't feel like the strawberries really tell us much about Reverie at all. And that's why I love them.

Some people might complain that this chapter tells a lot more than it shows. I've gone on record a couple times saying that I think the showing vs. telling dichotomy is far from the best way to judge writing. Telling or not, one of the things that stands out to me in this story is its sensuality – not in the sense of eroticism, but rather in the sense of sensory engagement. I commented on that with respect to the first chapter, where you start out a little slowly but with a real sense of a painter's palette and her unique view of the world.

I've heard it said, and generally believe it to be true, that good imagery requires the engagement of at least three senses. That's why I love those strawberries so much. They may not have a direct purpose on a characterization or plot level, but they're evocative. Imagery, being much more poetic than prosaic, is something I don't get to read a lot of in fanfiction. It's nice to see that switched up for a change.

[toafan]

She was not an overly outgoing mare by nature - it was difficult to be so, you see, when one's professional reputation ranged between brilliant visionary artist and mentally disturbed pornographer?

I'm very sorry to be making such a mountain out of this, but that absolutely must not be a question mark. It does not work. Not only is it not a question, in-context it's not even a proper stop; so you can't just swap in a period. (I originally thought my problem was that it's not a question, but it's more subtle than that.) A semicolon, however, would work perfectly there; it doesn't have the full-stopping power of a period or some such, but more power and appropriateness than a comma, dash, or colon.