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 Write a description with the title, ‘The artist’.

The brush snapped mid-stroke and spat a comet of ultramarine across the canvas—too bright, too alive—landing on the cheek of a woman who had never existed outside his head. He froze with the broken handle in his hand, listening. In the corridor beyond the studio door, footsteps skated past like impatient rain.

“Five minutes!” someone shouted, muffled by the walls, as if time itself had been wrapped in felt.

He didn’t answer. He leaned in until his breath fogged the varnish-sweet air. The paint had its own smell: metal, almonds, something bruised. He touched the blue with his fingertip. It was warm from the lamp, pulsing like a fresh wound.

The studio was a narrow ribcage of a room—one high window, taped at the edges where the glass had cracked in a previous life. On the floor, a constellation of tubes lay uncapped, oozing slow, patient colour. Rags knotted with pigment slumped in a bucket like exhausted birds. A radio murmured low, but the voice on it kept dissolving into static, as if it couldn’t bear to finish its own sentences.

He should have been calm. This was the night his work would finally hang under clean gallery lights, his name printed in black beside it, neat as a verdict. Yet his hands were trembling, not with excitement, but with the peculiar terror of being seen clearly.

He stepped back.

The woman on the canvas stared forward, chin tilted as if she had already forgiven him. Her hair was a storm of charcoal lines; her eyes were not quite symmetrical—one was sharper, more awake—because he could never make himself paint perfection. In the hollow beneath her collarbone, he had layered thin washes of grey until the skin looked translucent, like it was lit from inside by a secret.