A4A STUDIOS

At the edge of the small seaside village there lies a small rocky promontory jutting out into the ocean.

Everyday before the sun rises to greet the day with exception of Saturdays the bent old man trudges up the dirt path towing his wagon of paints brushes and supplies.

Where he comes from no no one knows. Where he lives, if he has a wife, a family, those that love him or even those that like or know him we know not. Of his past, his thoughts his likes, his dislikes nor anything at about him we know him not.

What is name is or might be or even whether or not he has a name we know not.

The people of village do not speak to him nor about him except in hushed whispers.

The old men who spend the mornings of their declining years at the seaside cafe sipping coffee, eating pastries and endlessly retelling and reliving their heavily embellished glory days do not have memories of the old man painter never not being there nor of him never not being old.

Everyday he sets up in the same spot over looking where the river ends it’s journey and merges into the sea. Everyday he spends his day painting frantically and alternatively just sitting and staring.

When he paints he does not paint the beauties of the sea and of the shore nor of the nature that makes up that world. Nor does he paint scenes of the quaint life in the village below nor of it’s idyllic natures or peoples.

He paints deeper darker things. He paints indescribable inhuman images that gnaw away the human spirit and are an affront to everything we hold dear.

It is as if he reaches deep into a bottomless pit of despicable depravity and pulls it out and gives it form and shape and a semblance of life.

Things that are gut wrenching, soul sapping portrayals of hopelessness and utter despair. Non have ever seen the finished pieces nor does anyone know what becomes of them. It has been said though that plenty of both the villagers and tourists and others that have wandered by and seen those works have been driven to madness and even suicide.

He is up there now still painting.