Ada Collins

Steph's first reaction is - understably - to laugh. A moment later however, the look on my face convinces her I'm actually pretty serious about my demand. "I don't have a bra on," she tells me. A sigh escapes my lips. If so, it can't be helped. "It's a distracting shirt," I say, glancing one more time at her before turning away. It's blood orange and ruby red stripes featuring a hot pink cat just over her chest and it's very close to being the most hideous pieces of clothing I've ever seen. I sail through my room to my easel and my chair for painting. There is the thing I have been working on this past week, a starry night and the galaxies hidden within colored dots.  She raises her shoulders in a shrug. "Grandma bought it. Ever since I dyed my hair orange last year, she thinks I have a thing with the color. I'm meeting up with her after this, so I gotta wear it." "What's Beth saying about it?" ...

On my way out of the building, I have my phone up against my ear, calling Steph to tell her to drop by my place. "When you're free," I add when someone at the other end of the line - someone other than Steph - sneezes loudly enough. "Alrigh, alright," Steph tells me and hangs up. I find mom at home, between ladles and spoons, as she's setting up the layers for a veggie lasagna. Back at home, I find mom between ladles and spoons setting up the layers for a veggie lasagna. It's a new recipe with ricotta cheese and spinach that she's just come across - scrolled down upon on Pinterest - and she couldn't help not try it. So, I sit at the table next to her to help and hand her one by one the sauces and the pasta sheets. Only when we're done and the pot is up in the heated oven, she sits down and I gain her full attention. "Mom," I start," do you remember LEONARDO?" In truth, I know she does. She's talked to me abo...

I get myself an iced tea and, halfway through drinking it, I enter the Academy's main building heading up on the stairs to the second floor. That's where my professor's office is. Campbell Allen - or sometimes Allen Campbell - is the one who brought me to this art school. He presided the jury in a contest I took part it back in middle school, and we kept in touch. Between that and my actual admission to the Painting Department here, he became the Head of it. Whilst he wouldn't teach himself anymore, he kept an eye on everything people did within the perimeter, but above that, he kept an eye on me. Prestigious schools tend to focus on the valuable studies and this was exactly the case. I am good and I deserved studying somewhere top-class, whilst the Academy retains the title and good reviews through what I achieve here. Me and many of the kids here. Steph, for a good other example. I've known her since before either of us had all the teeth and she's becom...

 Once, when asked what Trans-Siberia Orchestra was about, Paul O'Neill replied, "It's about creating great art ." Then, when asked to define what this   g r e a t   a r t   is, he answered, "The purpose of art is to create an emotional response in the person that is exposed to it. And there are three categories of art: bad art, good art and great art. Bad art will elicit no emotional response in that person: a song you hear in an elevator and it does nothing to you, a picture on a wall that gives you the same emotion as if the wall had been blank, a movie that chews up time. Good art will make you feel an emotion you have felt before: you see a picture of a forest and you remember the last time you went fishing with your dad, you hear a song about love and you remember the last time you were in love. Great art will make you feel an emotion you have never felt before: seeing Pieta , the world-famous sculpture by Michaelangelo, can cause someone to feel the p...

Steph Addams slams the door behind me whenever she comes into my room, announcing her presence. Normally she sinks her butt on some chair waiting for me to finish whatever patch of color I'm working on, but this time, when I glance sideways to her, she's almost running towards me. "I've been trying to call you," she says between short breaths, "we've all been trying to." "I was here." Putting down both the brush and the palette, I leave my place in front of the easel and follow her to the sofa at the opposite corner of the room. That is one of the few pieces of furniture I have in there, besides a chair and what used to be a dressing table for cosmetics, now with acrylics instead of eyeshadow and pencils instead of earrings. I kept the mirror on it, however, and the lights around it. The more light in the room, the better. I do have a bed too, somewhere under a stack of canvases - newly-bough blank ones and, majorly, scraps. Finishe...

When falling asleep last night, I saw a sky. The night scenery I have always longed to paint. This time, I could study it better. I could focus on all the details I never got right, like the stars that don't always need to be white or yellow. In reality and in my view, stars were green and red and blue and purple too, shining so long they contrasted well enough with the black darkness. I liked it. So the first thing I do once my left hand finds the brush and my right reaches for the palette is dump black and blue onto the shaking canvas. It's as much the old easel, as much an earthquake as it is the attack I ordered upon the rough white.

"At this point in my life I know I wouldn’t mind drowning on paintwater." I might not have even said those words, but they needed a good line to go with the headline. I might not have even given this interview, but they needed a good name to feature. "Prodigies are hard to find", said editor Mary Jane Donovan when my mom went asking why the hell I was in the newspaper. "I believe your daughter to be one and we sure as hell won't be missing her." But I was no prodigy. Prodigy is having your hands made for painting. I know because I've met one. I only had my heart and forced my hands to work their way across a canvas every single day, until they wouldn't stop shaking. I would rest a bit, then got back to my colors. Now, my fingers ached whenever they weren't on the brush. Painting wouldn't have chosen me hadn't I chosen it.