The hobby had found its start with a box of willow charcoal and a kneaded eraser. John scratched away at the blank page in front of him, molding his room in tones of gray. Instructions from years ago, decades now, drifted back to him, reminding him in no uncertain terms that vertical lines are always vertical and that parallel lines converge at the horizon. He found himself grateful, suddenly, for the throw away class in secondary school. It had given him a firmer foundation than he'd realized at the time.
The room was meticulous and expressionless. John's drawing gave it an energy it didn't possess. His bed wavered uncertainly, straying from the lines of perspective he'd set out for it, and he had unintentionally granted his few spare possessions a focus and precision which the rest of the room lacked. The drabness of his bedsit screamed from the amatueurly incohesive piece. He reworked it until it reached a fittingly inexpressive clarity.
Although the result of his hard work was hardly a masterpiece, it brought with it a certain realization. When he sunk himself into the act of capturing the scene before him, time passed in uncharacteristic leaps. The trance that he entered wasn't all that different from the blankness of staring at the wall, but when he came out the other end of it, something had been created. It made his time spent sitting and drifting among thoughts into an act of productivity, and as he continued to work at it, it filled him with a certain sense of satisfaction.
The next step in his process, as the first, was inspired by his therapist, although it was less directly suggested. What she'd said was that it would do him good to spend more time outside. What he'd found was that, while walking through London's parks, the sun never seemed to touch him. There was something to be said for the physical exertion, but with his leg an encumbrance, his walks were short and bitter. Instead, he took his new obsession out among the trees.
It didn't happen all at once. Drawing in public was something that required great fortitude. Until the point when he stepped outside with a sketchbook, the hobby had been something entirely his own. The first few times, he paused whenever someone passed his bench, his stick of charcoal tense and sometimes trembling above the page. When he was fully absorbed in his work, the tremor didn't bother him.
The new subject matter also proved to be a challenge. The park was a place of minuscule change. Passing hours would cause shadows to shift. People came and went, birds flirted about, and trees shook in the wind. His style became looser and more expressive, although he barely noticed at first, and he overcame the need to keep pushing down anything which wasn't steady and precise.
He'd switched to graphite due to convenience, but soon he began to find the spectrum of greys limiting. Winter was ebbing away, with new, green life creeping in to urge its passing. At about the same time that he first saw the violinist, John began experimenting with pastels. Chalk, he quickly found, was stubbornly insistent on sticking to his clothes, but oil pastels suited nicely. He shaped young leaves in yellow, blue, green, red, a play of layered color as the music rose and ebbed somewhere nearby.
One day, his caution overcome by curiosity and admiration, John sat on a different bench. It was well worn and creaked under his weight as he settled into place for the afternoon, cane propped beside him. The wood was damp from the morning's rain. All in all, it wasn't the ideal place to sit. Its sole advantage was that, when the violinist returned, he was directly in John's line of sight.
The man's face was the type that made him stare for a moment longer than his propriety would ordinarily allow. It was angular, but not quite gaunt, and reminded him of the books of elves and faeries which he'd liked as a kid but hadn't been allowed to take from the library. The crown of curls, the full lips, the pale skin: it all would have blended into the pages, if only he were wearing a sprig of berries or something of the sort. Of course, there was also his height, making him all slender limbs. The way he swayed with his music, as if entranced in the spell he was weaving, made it difficult to look away. Fortunately, John's work compelled him to catch as many glances as he could.
He began with pencil sketches, and soon had a page filled with gesture drawings of his faerie man. The next day, he boldly approached his subject in full color. The violinist was barely detailed in the midst of John's usual park landscape, but he was the focal point nonetheless, dark and dynamic between the benches. He was almost like a ghoul. The suit, John was learning, was a constant.
There was a day missed on John's part and a day on the other man's before John finally found himself approaching the challenge of that odd, beautiful face. He sketched it out in raw umber, always fitting among the trees, then began filling in snatches of orange and blue as he balanced sun and shadow. The dappling from spring leaves was something to contend with, and it took hours for John's scribbling to coalesce into something satisfactory. He was surprised when he glanced up to perfect the line of the jaw and saw that his muse was packing away his instrument.
"I didn't give you permission to draw me."
Although the man loomed over him and his words were hardly welcoming, something in his voice gave John the vague impression that he was pleased. The drawings were already folded away inside John's sketchbook, and he wasn't certain he wanted to display them. His work was something seldom shared, and these particular drawings were more personal to him than many of the rest. "Your playing's brilliant," he said, to soften any judgement, and turned to the ghoul drawing first.
The man had rocked on his feet at his words, but now leaned over the sketchbook like a bird of prey. His eyes looked sharper up close. When they rose to take in John himself, he felt like a spotlight had been placed on him. "This isn't what you drew today," he said, correctly, and John turned to the proper page.
For a brief, tense moment, John fully the man to request the drawing be destroyed. The laser focus of those eyes was difficult to read into, but graceful fingers tapping idly against the man's leg finally gave him the all clear. Again, he found himself under scrutiny, but he could tell it wasn't ill intentioned. "Afghanistan or Iraq?"