Chapter Four

Ginny looked around for paintbrushes but could see none in the classroom, but no one else seemed concerned about this. She returned her attention to Oliver, tall and relaxed in the center of the circle of easels.

"Well, as you seem to have noticed, Ginny," he began, "and as you two might have suspected, we aren't going to use any paintbrushes in this classroom. In fact, I don't even have any in the building. I rarely use them in my own work anyway, either. They're just a huge inconvenience when you have what we have. What do you guys think we all have in common in this group?"

"Too much spare time," muttered Ginny.

"Sarcastic senses of humor," whispered Hermione, clearly in response to her friend's rude suggestion.

"Magic," said Roger Davies simply, finally peering out from behind his easel. Over the years since Hogwarts, he had at least not lost his hair. His teeth were a different story, which was unusual for wizards. "We're all wizards- or witches," he added, looking over at Hermione and Ginny and winking.

"Roger's right," Oliver said simply, thrusting his hands into the pockets of his jeans and crossing his legs as he leaned against his easel again. "We've all got something special about us that Muggles couldn't even dream of. We're all gifted. We've got a way of creating art that no one in the so-called 'normal world' has got. So we're going to use it. I want each of you to picture a painting on the canvas in front of you. It doesn't matter what style it's in or anything like that. Just picture it. I'd like you to think seriously about it, but whatever kind of seriousness you want is fine. Do you have a favorite porn film you want to immortalize in a painting? I don't care! We're all adults here, we don't need a censor on our creativity. I'm going to do all these exercises with you, so don't feel like I'm going to be wandering around while you think, making sure you're concentrating hard enough and waving my hands in front of your faces. Think about what you want, and close your eyes and imagine it being painted on your canvas by the hand of someone who knows how to paint."

There was a moment of silence. Ginny looked over at Hermione, who was still blushing from the porn comment, then back to Oliver, who had his eyes closed. "What are you waiting for?" he asked, not opening his eyes but quirking his lips a little. "Think of it. If you feel something, channel it in your thoughts onto the canvas with your painting."

Ginny glanced at Roger, who was twitching a little nervously with his eyes screwed tightly shut, then closed her own eyes and tried to think of a painting. Her mind drifted gently until it came to rest on a sandy dune field she had seen while in Egypt. All that was there was the yellow-brown sand and the blue sky. The colors were pure, thick, and vibrant. The heat fell from the sun and rose again from the sand in a continuous, shimmering loop. There were no people in Ginny's mind's eye, just space and freedom and…

Before Ginny could catch up to her thoughts, the picture in her mind started to change. It became exaggerated to just the sky and a thin strip of yellow-brown at the bottom, impossible to divine by anyone not privy to the initial scene. The sun disappeared in lieu of a flock of white birds, circling each other in perfect coordination, and the entire image began to blend into itself. Eventually it was just a blur of blue surrounding a blur of white with a diagonal slash of yellow-brown at the base. Ginny's brain felt warm and heavy in her head and without having to think about it or even really try, she put that warm heaviness into the picture and it seemed to glow brighter. The colors became even more vivid, the birds almost seemed to move on their own within their white blur, and the warmth poured off the canvas and into Ginny. What did everything mean?

"Open your eyes."

Oliver's voice cut into her experience and Ginny threw her eyelids open with the kind of force that was necessary only on the most exhausting of mornings when waking up from an immersive dream. And indeed that was a little how she felt. She was breathing a little more heavily than usual and she glanced around at Hermione to see how her friend had reacted to her thought experience. Hermione looked unruffled and actually looked calmer than she had after the porn imagery. Ginny sighed and turned back to look at her empty canvas, trying to imagine her painting again.

She didn't have to.

With a sharp intake of breath, Ginny stared at her canvas, splattered with a less breathtaking but still fairly exact representation of her Egyptian landscape. It was the initial image she had come up with, sky and sand still perfectly imagined, sun burning realistically in the impermeably blue sky. What the hell had happened.

"Now I'm sure at least one of you is really stunned at what just happened," Oliver said, smiling around at the three of them. "Do any of you want to show us your canvases before I tell you what's going on?"

Ginny looked uneasily again at Hermione, but her friend's old school tendencies had taken over and she was already busying about turning her easel to show the others. Ginny glanced at Roger, who looked like he wasn't going to share anything with the class in the near future; she suspected he had taken Oliver's advice and imagined some kind of graphic sex act and accidentally splashed it on his canvas.

"Here's what I imagined," Hermione said breathlessly. "I think it turned out rather nicely. I've taken painting classes before and read up on the theory of magical art, so I understand pretty well what's taking place when the meditative painting exercise. I thought of my boyfriend the way he looked before I went to work this morning."

Ginny cringed, not really wanting to see her brother naked or anything like that but also not urgent to disrupt any kind of class procedure she might not know about, but she should have expected that any painting Hermione made would be appropriate for all audiences. It was almost sepia-toned and didn't seem to have much in the way of color, save Ron's bright red hair tousled over his head. His body was a blurry mess of striped pajamas and whether he was in a bed or a chair was completely unclear. Hermione's painting wasn't nearly as exact as Ginny's, but Ron's face was obviously what Hermione had concentrated on; it was perfect in every detail. He had a few crow's feet around his eye, the smoothed-out wrinkles of his forehead were relaxed in sleep, his mouth hung open and Ginny could almost hear his snoring as she remembered it growing up. His nose was exactly right. Ginny felt as though she was looking at a photograph of her older brother's face.

"Nice, Hermione," Oliver said. "It looks like you really wanted the face perfect and you make the viewer feel that too. Awesome."

Hermione beamed at the praise and returned her easel to its original position, thanking Oliver as she did so.

"Anyone else?" Oliver asked, looking between Roger and Ginny. "Oh, come on, we'll all have to put ourselves and our work on display at some point so you might as well do it now. I'm going to show you what I did last, so don't feel like I'm making you do anything I won't do myself."

"Fine," Roger snapped, and pulling out his wand, he levitated and rotated his easel. "Here's my painting."

Ginny gazed blankly at the canvas, which was just a mess of color. Red, green, yellow, blue, orange, purple, brown; they all streaked across the canvas in straight lines but in no particular order. Oliver smirked.

"I'm guessing you didn't like your initial thought," he remarked, and Roger turned a little red as he returned his canvas to the easel. "I like it, though. It's pretty crazy how even a giant cover-up can be considered art. But don't go to the Louvre and paint over the Mona Lisa, all right? I'm not encouraging that."

There was a moment of polite laughter, and then three pairs of eyes turned to Ginny. "Ready, Ginny?" asked Oliver. "Since it's your first time doing this, from what I gather, I'm pretty stoked to see what you came up with. I'm guessing you're pretty confused by all this, too."

"Yeah," Ginny said, "I guess I'm a little confused, but I did come up with something." She struggled with her easel for a moment before sighing and doing what Roger had done. As she turned her canvas toward the group, Oliver frowned and moved from his easel toward her picture. Hermione gasped and clapped her hands excitedly, exclaiming "Oh, Ginny, that's wonderful!" Roger grinned at the canvas, taking in the painting. Ginny blushed; she hadn't thought it was particularly good, although it was almost impossibly good for someone who had no artistic talent whatsoever.

"Ginny," Oliver said slowly, and suddenly she forgot Roger's and Hermione's reactions, "have you done this before and just didn't tell me?"

"No… At least, not that I know of," Ginny said, glancing at Hermione, who shook her head in a somehow supportive way. "This is my first time doing any painting since I was a kid doing paint-by-numbers and I have legitimately no artistic talent whatsoever, so…"

"Okay, okay," Oliver said, peering at her canvas, his face just inches away. Ginny toyed with the idea of "accidentally" flicking the painting and hitting him in the nose, but she decided it probably wouldn't be a smart idea to make an enemy out of someone who she sort-of knew from school and now had as a teacher in an art class that seemed to potentially be either a lot of fun or a lot of misery. So instead she held her wand and her painting steady while Oliver stared at the canvas. "This is Egypt," he said finally, straightening again and looking at Ginny. It wasn't a question; he knew it was Egypt somehow.

"Yes," Ginny replied, somehow unsettled by his total surety about her admittedly somewhat ambiguous painting. "I was just thinking, I guess, about a trip I took there last year… I don't know, the whole process seems sort of foggy right now. I think the painting kind of started doing itself after a while, I don't remember what I was doing."

"Yeah, I know," Oliver said, looking again at her canvas. "This is excellent, Ginny. You're a natural."

"Oh," Ginny blurted, seriously taken aback.

"I'm just trying to read your painting a little bit," Oliver said reassuringly. "You could easily see in Hermione's why she had chosen her boyfriend; she clearly loves him a lot. Roger's was a censor for his own thoughts. I'm no shrink, but I guess he's got some issues to handle. I'm just trying to learn from your painting what you loved about Egypt so much that you painted it."

"I guess it was the heat or the colors," Ginny said. "I remember them both being seriously important in the process somehow. The heat was like ... floating around, between the ground and the sun. The sun was important. I don't know."

Oliver grinned at her. "I think I know. Ginny, you're not as hard to see through as you want to be."

Ginny frowned. "Um, excuse me?"

"Sorry, Ginny," Oliver said, "but it seems pretty obvious to me what you really miss about Egypt. You miss the freedom. It's clear to anyone looking at it- the sky is much, much larger than the land. The land slopes, leading toward the air. The sun looks a little out of place. You wanted a clear sky, or maybe another indication of independence, but you got nervous. You probably didn't even realize it. This is a very natural painting. I love it. I'm looking forward to painting with you and seeing what you come up with. All of you did well," he added, backing up and addressing the whole classroom again. "Now we're going to get to work."