The old man with a broken guitar sat in a corner, admiring the picture from a distance, so intently that he forgot only an hour ago his guitar had fallen on its neck and broken into a miserable two. His head was aching with an ache that seemed to move inside his head from corner to corner, but his sweat was drying up and he felt better. He had an odd condition due to which one of his eyes grew larger than the other when he was immersed in something and wasn’t paying attention to control his condition. So the old man with the broken guitar sat in a corner admiring the picture with no perspective intently with one eye larger than the other feeling fresh from the evaporating sweat, a feeling that surely interfered with his interpretation.
A little kid was looking at the picture closely, the painting so large and real that he seemed to be a part of it. Everything seemed big to him, he couldn’t understand when the voices around him discussed how the painter had paid so much attention to painting such small boats and people. A house in the painting lay tilted at an odd angle but when he tilted his head to see it better, the house was overwhelmed by the strange and horrifying face that was now staring at him from a corner. He seemed to have a broken neck and oddly shaped eyes. His hands unclasped due to an onrush of fear.
A journalist was taking pictures of the gallery, staring into the camera’s viewfinder with the eye that he trusted would be a good judge of the picture’s composition. He thought of including some people staring at the painting in the picture, and was looking at different angles that would show the reaction the painting generated in the audience. He caught a particular girl staring at him, he thought he would flatter her later if he had a picture of hers in his armory. He took a picture of her staring into the viewers’ eyes with the painting as a backdrop so she looked like the Monalisa, only a bit more real and sorrowful. His neck was now straining with pain.
The artist was in his studio, thinking of how a self-contained painting could be drawn. He thought about how ones in the painting had to be watching the painting and those would be the most honest judges of his work. He was wrong, of course, they had no perspective. He then thought of removing perspective altogether and make a painting that was floating in space and frozen in time.
He had the skill. But he couldn’t do it, his wrists were sore from holding the brush at a certain angle all the while and his eyes strained from staring at the painting for so long.