Painted to Death by Sarah Vernon

Author:Sarah Vernon [Sarah Vernon]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Maia Dolphin-Krute
Published: 2022-11-29T00:00:00+00:00

I made a mental note of the date and time on Benny’s flyer and continued across the lobby, heading up yet another musty staircase to the sculpture studio on the second floor. There was no class held there on Thursday afternoons, so those of us taking “Mud, Mineral, Clay” were free to use the facilities. Whether it would help me think through everything or not, I did need to work on my miniature pottery for tomorrow’s class.

I dropped my bag on the floor next to a workbench, and headed to the back of the room to pick up my small urns, again lining them up on the bench with my various pots of glazes and paints. So far I had a set of six urns that had made it through the firing process without breaking, all under three inches in height. Each was a classic amphora shape (although not all the handles had survived the heat of the kiln). Now, each one would need to be painted, with tiny Grecian figures added to circle each form in bands of terracotta and black. I heaved a heavy stack of books out of my bag that I had picked up at work the day before: History of Ancient Pottery: Greek, Etruscan and Roman; Greek Pottery Painting; Greek and Roman Pottery and Small Terracottas. So just some light reading, all with plenty of pictures to work from. I flipped open to a few pages I had already bookmarked, showing full color spreads of classic Greek motifs of athletes and revelers styled in red and black. To start, I would have to paint each urn in a dark brown umber, which would turn even darker and more velvet when it was fired. I always felt a bit like an alchemist at this stage in the pottery studio, forever in awe of the way that simple mixtures of minerals could transform from something humdrum and blah to a shining, vibrant color.

Quickly, I felt my mind calm and settle with each dip of the paintbrush into the pot of glaze, each swipe of paint along the smooth pottery. This kind of work was always my favorite: with no small or intricate details to worry about yet, I could simply make something, let my hands take over, be in my zone. Still, as I built up the layers of thin glaze, I felt my mind start to wander back to Professor Thompson and our conversation. I wasn’t sure what to make of his reluctance to talk about Catherine. Everyone else I talked to, whether they really knew her or not, seemed almost bizarrely or inappropriately eager to talk about her death, as if we were all living on the set of a true crime show now and everyone wanted equal camera time. But Thompson clearly didn’t, and he didn’t strike me as someone who would be particularly modest in this (or any) situation. So obviously, the conclusion I had to come to was that he had something to hide.

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