Read Online The Golden Fleece by Brian Stableford - Free Book Online

central figure than the bottom. The fishy part was quite well-done, elegantly curled and beautifully colored in the scales, which were silver behind all the myriad blue reflections of water-modified sky. The human half, by contrast, was vague, the rippling blonde hair seeming in need of the attentions of a good hairdresser, and the features rather flat
     
    Was this a sort-of-portrait too? Adrian wondered. Was the siren a means by which Angelica was trying to represent herself, metaphorically as well as literally? If so, what did her apparent failure—which might, of course be deliberate—signify? Loneliness, no doubt...a sense of difference, obviously...but what else?
     
    Adrian had always felt more comfortable with pure exercises in color and form, like Rothko’s or Pollock’s. Monet’s gardens, too, he felt that he understood very well, and Georgia O’Keefe’s flowers. But Dante Gabriel Rossetti...he had appreciated the pre-Raphaelite attention to detail, but not the siren quality of his women’s faces, the extreme subtleties of his attitude to the models with which he had had such tortured and convoluted personal relationships....
     
    All in all, Adrian found the blue siren less unsettling than the red inferno, but there was still a hint of damnation about it that seemed menacing as well as uncanny.
     
    The green was forest foliage, with hidden faces peeping through it: nymphs and fauns, Adrian assumed, or maybe mere fairy folk. Again, the faces were too vague to be identifiable, by species let alone as individuals. Some tended to the ugly, some to the beautiful, but none to the meek and sanitized. On the other hand, they were not exactly malevolent either—merely slightly unhuman, weirdly hybridized.
     
    The composition of the picture, and the manner in which the foliage and the faces were intermingled, was very ambitious— perhaps a trifle too ambitious, although it showed off the artist’s technique to better effect than the simpler and more straightforward images. Complication helped to offset the slight individual faults of curvature. It was easier to see in this picture that Angelica had had some professional training, and had benefited from it, in spite of being handicapped by insufficient natural ability in her brushwork. Adrian had looked up her biography with the aid of a search engine, and knew that she had done two years at the Courtauld before dropping out—or, more accurately as well as more kindly, moving on. It must have become obvious to her over those two years that she would never be able to create a work of art as wonderful as the one she constituted in herself, even with the aid of full-spectrum color vision.
     
    She had not given up, though. She had carried on painting, in private, concentrating increasingly on work that only she could see.
     
    The pale brown was sand: Egyptian sand, to judge by the ruins and statuary projecting through it at intervals. Some of the half-buried statues had faces, but they weren’t human faces; they were the faces of sphinxes. Inevitably, Shelley’s immortal line—”Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!”—sprang to mind, but that wasn’t really the tenor of the picture. It wasn’t celebrating or regretting the decay that had all but erased the residue of a once-great civilization, but using its extreme subtlety of color to imply a near-identity between the stones and the sand, the shaped and the shapeless. It was an austere picture, but there was nothing sinister about it, and Adrian couldn’t get any implication of the supernatural from its peeping sphinxes, which seemed like mere human artifacts, fading into dust in the wake of their makers.
     
    The dark brown, on the other hand, was a calculated exercise in the sinister and the supernatural, which seemed to be aiming to create a sense of unease by concealing its effects just out of the range of ordinary human sight. This one might not have seemed like a mere splodge even to Jason