Murder at the Arts and Crafts Festival by G.P. Gardner

Author:G.P. Gardner
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Lyrical Press
Published: 2019-10-18T21:44:12+00:00

Chapter 11

We were the last of the class members to reach the bottom of the gully.

“This is what we’ve come to see.” Katherine stood at the foot of the ramp, facing a section of the wall.

At head height, a face had been sculpted into the gray concrete. Larger than life size, and protruding slightly from the flat wall, the face was stained by age and weather. Numerous black dots the size of a pinpoint, and several hemispherical dents about as big as a pencil eraser, spotted the face. The cheeks were rounded, the nose was shaped like a small light bulb, and the bulging eyes were half hooded. The rest of the wall had sprouted crusty colonies of lichens, in shades of brown and tan, but the face was spared such indignities.

“I’ve wanted to draw this face since the first time I saw it,” Katherine said. “Now we’re all going to do it together.”

She had both hands on the face, caressing the cheeks. Then she pinched the nose and brushed a little dirt off the brow. “Notice that the concrete is almost the color of graphite.”

“What is graphite, exactly?” one of the teenagers asked. “Lead?”

“A type of carbon,” Katherine answered without looking at him. “Lead is a misnomer. Ask me when we get back to the studio. Right now, I want everyone to concentrate on this face. Come up and feel it. It’s gritty. It’s rough, and that texture is what you’ll be drawing, as much as the features.”

Her admiration for the face was oddly sensuous and sincere. I looked again, trying to see what inspired her. She ran a finger over the shadowy, almost invisible curve of the mouth, and then stepped back to allow us to take turns exploring the face with our hands.

Nita couldn’t quite reach the eyes.

When everyone had filed past, feeling the texture and features and snapping a few photographs with our cell phones, Katherine returned with a yard-long length of cotton cord.

“This is how you’ll get the proportions for your drawing, whatever size you decide it will be.”

She held the cord against the face and made knots to mark the exact top and bottom of the face. Then she folded the cord in half and made another knot at the midpoint.

“We’ll put in two more knots and then make a photo, lining up the facial features to the quarter, half, and three-quarters marks.” She spent a couple more minutes measuring the lengths of cord, making knots, and then adjusting the knots until she was satisfied. Then she held the cord in place while most people took photographs. “You’ll reproduce this with a cord sized to fit your drawing paper. If you like, you can draw a grid over a photo and match it to a grid sized for your paper.”

“I’ll use your photographs, if you don’t mind,” Nita told me. “If I drew from my perspective, I’d be looking up his nose.”

Katherine was repeating the knotted cord process, working in the horizontal direction this time with a second cord.

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