got artist!elliot on the brain

this is messy but the vibes in my head are like (1) elliot who had an artist for a mother and elliot who wanted to be an architect and elliot whose father beats it out of him. elliot who teaches himself, mostly, because bernie doesn’t always have the time or the patience or the temperament, and anyway, he’s not an artist like that. he’s not like his mother, it’s just something that he does. (2) elliot who neglects his skills as he gets older. who hides them, who tells himself it’s the responsibilities he gains as a father that push art to the bottom of his priorities and not the echo of joe’s voice in his head calling it useless. (3) elliot who can never let it go completely. it’s tied to too much, half of his happy childhood memories moments he spent at his mother’s feet, paint on his cheek and under his nails and wiped across his clothes. (4) elliot who sketches occasionally, who’s quick to draw with his children when they call him to join. solo work mostly happens when he’s bored: scribbles in the margins of his notes and on post-its and other scraps of paper, the majority of it scrunched up and thrown away soon after he’s done. (5) olivia who notices during their first year as partners and elliot who tries to brush it off, who calls the scribbles stupid, who can’t look her in the eye when she says no, really, you’re very good and (6) elliot who will think, later, that maybe it started there, in that shitty dim lit closet of a filing room, where olivia smiled at him like the damn sun was in her mouth and asked, can you draw me? i mean. if you want to. he does want to—or he wants to try; he thinks it’s probably above his skill level—but he never gets the chance to do it properly. they get distracted by work before he can even try, but (7) olivia who finds her look-alike scribbled on a bright pink post-it note stuck to a cup of coffee that appears on her desk one morning in the winter of ’98 and (8) elliot in europe with a coffee stained sketchbook who sits on his balcony and in cafes and in front of buildings and tries to replicate the beauty in front of him and (9) elliot with torn pages hidden away, the pieces ripped out before they could be completed, the face of a woman who should’ve been a passer-by a little too familiar.