My friends and I are in an on-again/off-again writing club where the rules are simple. Every two weeks you have to submit three short stories that it took you 20 minutes or less to write. These are the results.

High Energy Painting

I met a few friends at the bar after work, and some of them were going to head over to an art show. I’m no high culture fiend or anything, but I like going to see exhibits at the museum and stuff, so I thought, why not?

We ended up in some loft in some area of town that looked run down yet still has well dressed young white kids running around all over. When we get up to the guy’s apartment or studio or whatever it is, it’s filled with a pretentious looking crowd standing around with red, plastic cups. They’re all ignoring the guy standing on a splattered tarp on a raised part of the floor in the corner. He’s wildly attacking a canvas with a brush to speed metal.

Again, I’m no art studies major, but I know something I like when I see it. I pull up a chair next to the platform, just as he’s putting in a new album.

“Hey, what exactly are you doing right now?” I ask him.

“This is my art style. I paint as fast as I can to fast music. I call my style High Energy. So this album lasts about 40 minutes, and the whole time, I’m going to paint as quickly as I can.”

“Cool.” I replied as I settled back to get ready to watch the show.

Blank canvas lined up and music queued up, he started thrashing his brush against the white surface the second the opening guitar lick kicked in. I sat and watched him intently, grabbing and mixing paint, throwing brushes to the wayside when they were worn out, sweating profusely only 15 minutes into the album. Every so often, one of my friends would wander by and watch with me, saying something like, “He’s brilliant, isn’t he?”

Just as rapidly as the CD had started, it just as rapidly ceased, and so did his painting. He walked away, never looking back, and headed to the bathroom. There his painting sat – a wild jumble of lines and random shapes, with no discernable pattern. Part of the canvas he never touched, so the whole thing looked unfinished.

A girl wearing a black and white striped scarf walked by and commented, “Wow, I’d always heard he was good, but wow.”

As soon as that was said, I stood up, left the party and walked home with the image of that painting in my mind most of the time. As I pictured the piece, the thought that popped into my head the most was, ‘art is stupid.’