Seduce Me

I can’t even turn my head to look at her or make any kind of answer. Oh my! How gorgeous can a man look? I have never seen Va

‘You look very handsome,’ I say softly.

‘Thank you. You look exactly how I imagined you would in an evening dress.’

He doesn’t elaborate further, but I blush like a schoolgirl.

A waitress appears with a mirrored tray bearing a selection of canapés. She waves her free hand towards them and tries to tempt us with creamed, piped anchovies, lobster mousse, or even blue cheese with poached pears.

Even the thought of food makes me feel ill. Both Va

Va

My head rears back. ‘I’m the star?’

‘Yeah. I want you to see the collection before it opens to the public. Come,’ he says, and, laying his hand on the small of my back, guides me towards an area sectioned off with red ropes. With an untouched drink in my hand I follow him into the viewing area.

And blink.

That’s fucking me! On that canvas. And… I am beautiful beyond anything I have seen in the mirror. Not beautiful as a human being is, but as an image can be. And… I am much, much larger than I really am. And yet I am luxuriously, gloriously beautiful. I remember his words. You will be desired, cherished and possessed for the very things you are ashamed of.

How can I describe Va

I stand there shocked.

There is only one word for my state of being. Overcome. As I move from canvas to canvas, Va

Amongst the dabs and strokes of color, I see Blake, I see Smith, I see flowers, I see skulls, I see robed Chinese horsemen, and snakes and cranes. I see Yehonala, and I see me. I see me everywhere. In every painting: there I am, eyes glazed with passion, or dreamy, or angry, or hard, or sly. Standing by the window, the sunlight streaming in, throwing the colors and patterns of a large, open, semi- transparent fan onto my breasts.

And I see Va

In each wild, joyful splash of color I see his dreams, his desire for freedom. It is everything that matters to him, everything worth giving up what he once called ‘the unyears’ for. I feel proud of him.

Skulls, snakes, evil-looking flowers, but all have been transformed into objects of terrible beauty. In one painting a baby, its eyes open, is in a jar. Fragmented pain vibrates across the canvas as if the painting itself is crying. You can’t just hang that on a wall and not look at it. It screams at you to look at it, experience it—it’s terrible beauty. It is like the lure of Medusa.

As I pass through I notice that all his paintings have a lyrical longing that is fraught with something darker. Sometimes it comes in the way of horns where none should be. Sometimes in the form of sharp cornered black cubes or the single eye, suspended and watching. I remember—the symbol for the brutal God El.

Finally, we come to the last piece, the pièce de résistance.

I can’t take my eyes off it.

And you must bear with me now because I have to describe it to you. It is unbearably erotic and sublimely beautiful in execution, but there is something else. A something that almost feels as if the painting is alive and it is gently purring at you. The undercurrent of mystery and emotion that powers out of it is like a palpable energy. It makes my stomach clench. It reminds me of the feeling I had when I was reading Lana’s notes. The uneasy sensation that hidden away from my view, in the dark there are things that I know nothing of.

In the painting I am sitting in a garden, and the garden is so lush and so dreamy that the viewer will convince himself that it must be Paradise. I am nude, sitting with my legs wide open, head tilted slightly, mouth parted, and eyes mysteriously hooded and inviting: it is a brazen invitation to whoever is watching to enter me. But they won’t dare. A very large cobra is coiled around my body and my legs. Its hood is extended and its mouth aggressively open. It is a fierce guard. For my sex.

I remember his words, ‘Beauty is dangerous. It has the ability to tantalize and crush. Even strange beauty.’

The painting is titled Adam & Eve. It would seem that I am Eve and the cobra is Adam, but—here’s the occult gem: Va

I don’t turn to him and say the work is beautiful, because that would cheapen it, judge it, classify it. Let it be left that his art left me speechless.

‘My art didn’t come out of a vacuum. It came in a flash… After you. Thank you.’

I turn to look at him. He looks unbearably sad. I want to put my arms around him, but I know it will be the wrong thing now. Later. I have plans for this man. I don’t know what is in my eyes, but he takes a step back from me.

‘Let’s go back out. I’ll introduce you to everyone.’

I nod, and we leave that area and go back out amongst the glittering people. Lana comes to me. She is wearing a jaw-droppingly large, pink diamond teardrop pendant necklace. After she gets pulled away I smile and nod, and smile and nod, but I am not the same person who came in to see the exhibition. All I can think of is that last painting of Adam and Eve. The expression on my face, the exaggerated plumpness of my mouth, the ferocity of the Adam between my legs. Va

His paintings make me remember what I thought I had forgotten from my school days. A snatch of Oscar Wilde. To reveal the art and conceal the artist is art’s aim.

I start again at the begi

‘The colors remind of Ed Baynard’s Flowers That Talk range, but the background is almost Murakami.’ A woman declares that they are ‘scary but compelling the same way a road accident is. Horrible but it makes you look.’ A man with a pompous voice makes me stop and listen. ‘It’s good, but there is too much slavish attention to beauty.’

He is exactly the kind of intellectual snob who would declare a tin of excrement as an i

A man comes to stand beside me. ‘So, you’re the muse.’

I look at him. He is in his thirties and brilliantly successful in some capacity that would make him useless on a desert island. But here, he is a prince holding two glasses of champagne. He is the kind of guy that would install a lap dancer’s pole in his bedroom.