Hal Duncan, page 2
The paintings that result from Cubique thought are, by Platonic standards, unimpeachable, offering no illusion, no deception: if they were held up at a distance, no one would question their nature. In fact, the viewer unfamiliar with the tropes of Cubique painting may well find it difficult to distinguish any elements whatever they will recognise. Cubiques, unlike the "ignorant" artists Platon exiles from his great utopia with its philosopher-king, concern themselves with painting as a theme, painters creating paintings about painting, painted only to be viewed and understood as paintings.
I gaze at the Cubique painting on the gallery wall.
I abandon linearity, temporality, in Pharis. I fly out of 1993 and into 1910. I buy a Kodak Brownie and take snapshots of the carts drawn by chimaera down the streets. I wear an aviator's leather jacket, goggles, fly a box-kite, think of skyscrapers now being built in the reticulated streets of old New Amsterdam. I pose as Melmoth, sipping absinthe in a pavement cafe. I step sidewise, slide into a boulevard world where Rimbaud never died but, bored of poetry and bored of guns, became a painter, shattering his art into these... facets of the senses, these bizzare cubiques.
Story Copyright © 2008 by Hal Duncan. All rights reserved.
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About the author
Hal Duncan is the author of Vellum, and the follow-up Ink. He lives in the West End of Glasgow, but you can find him over on his blog. This story was originally published in Fantasy.
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Anonymous, Hal Duncan
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