Art of the Illusion

The Tales of Minz series is narrated and edited by fictional characters. This short story is set in their whimsical world. Learn more about the series here.

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From time to time in his Tales of Minz books, Vern has indicated a distaste for certain art styles, sarcastically commenting on the imprecise nature of abstract expressionism and the inaccuracy of portraits that shy away from total, unbiased realism. He has even gone so far as to complain about the very artist upon whom this short story focuses. 

I believe that this brief tale is his way of apologizing for his past actions, as well as to indicate that maybe, just maybe, his opinions on art and its importance in our lives have changed.

—Barnabas E. Wooldridge

Editor in Chief of the Tales of Minz

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All great artists know that they’re creating an illusion. 

That illusion is like mirror-glass. It presents a reflection that is similar to what it is trying to capture, but it is not what it reflects. It can never be that thing. It can only ever be a reflection. Close but never exact. Realistic, but never reality. 

Art is an illusion, but so are stories. The true skill of the artist lies in making the illusion believable—even if the person viewing it knows that it’s an illusion, they’re still drawn in all the same. And that’s exactly where the artist wants them. Because that’s when the magic really happens. Life is breathed into the illusion, and the art becomes something more than the mere reflection it once was. It becomes, even for a moment, real. 

Now, I can guess what you might be thinking from this introduction. Oh, I get it. Vern is going to tell a story about an artist who dabbled with magical paint and brought their artwork to life. That sounds pretty interesting. 

Unfortunately, no, I am not. (Though, I do have a fascinating story about that very phenomenon—it just requires a little more time and pages to tell. So, if you’re interested, give me a few years. I have some other projects to work on in the meantime.) I have another sort of story to tell here. 

This is a story about art and the illusion it reveals as a reflection of reality. But it is also more. I cannot paint with a brush, but I can paint with words. Come closer, Dear Reader, and let me tell you a story. A story about the inherent magic of art. 

Rebekah wasn’t a great artist like Malronti. She wasn’t even classically trained—she was self-taught and enjoyed drawing scenes of nature, like birds perched on tree branches and deer drinking from streams. Unfortunately, that wasn’t what she painted most regularly. She just happened to be an artist who was in the wrong place at the wrong time, and now she traveled throughout the land, commissioned by the Forty-Seven Warlords to paint their portraits.

A warlord named Lawrence had been the first to discover her (he forced Rebekah to paint him or else he’d burn her city to the ground). Once the other warlords heard that Lawrence had commissioned a professionally done portrait of himself, well, they couldn’t let themselves be outdone. They had to have Rebekah come and do the same for them. And it had to be her—otherwise Warlord Lawrence could always claim that he had the artist Rebekah paint his portrait, and who did the other warlords have do theirs, the artist Tim? Ridiculous. Tim was a hack. Everybody knew that.

Mercifully, very few threatened to burn Rebekah’s city to the ground if she didn’t cooperate. Most of them even paid her. A small pittance, for sure, since many of the Warlords were on a tight budget, but hey, it was usually enough to put food on the table for Rebekah and her family. And so, Rebekah went, traveling throughout the land, answering their summons (because warlords weren’t the type of people you refused) and painting their portraits. 

Now, you might think that this would only last for a little while. Forty-seven portraits is a great many pieces to paint, but it’s not an inexhaustible source of business, right? Wrong. Due to the near-constant influx of backstabbing, assassination attempts, and infighting, the rise of new warlords joining the Forty-Seven was rather regular. And every new and upcoming warlord knew that one of the only ways that they’d be recognized amongst their new peers and respected by them would be to have a professionally done portrait by the artist Rebekah. 

Very few of the Forty-Seven Warlords didn’t reach out to Rebekah and request a commissioned portrait. Only one or two, in fact. (One of them being a Warlord named Ozzy, who lived out in the Wasteland and felt that a professionally done portrait would never withstand the blistering heat and elements.)

But here was the thing—the thing that kept Rebekah up at night because she was something of a perfectionist with an eye for detail (as befitting of an artist): none of her portraits of the Forty-Seven Warlords were quite right. She knew her paintings weren’t accurate portrayals of her subjects. Of course she did. 

They were inaccurate, aggrandized versions of the inhumane, terrible beings who posed in front of her canvas with ridiculous stances and postures. They were all men and women who dreamed of sitting on the throne of Marglegruff and didn’t care who they had to kill to get there. That sort of inconsiderate, selfish, egotistical, megalomaniac’s disposition didn’t leave them with pleasant features or expressions.

But Rebekah couldn’t very well paint the warlords the way she really saw them. She couldn’t paint portraits of the ever-changing members of the Forty-Seven Warlords accurately. They would see her hanged because they certainly wouldn’t like what they saw on the canvas, any more than they’d like what they saw in the mirror-glass if they looked long and hard at themselves and their reflection.

So what was Rebekah to do? She rather liked living and didn’t want to lose her life for painting an accurate portrait of an inhumane, terrible being. But she also had standards as an artist. Her inaccurate portrayals were weighing heavily on her conscience, and she didn’t know how she was supposed to keep doing what she was doing. She couldn’t very well quit; the Forty-Seven Warlords would never let her do that. She was trapped. And she didn’t know what to do. 

The answer finally dawned on her on an early Delin day in 1267 of the Third Age. Rebekah was traveling along the Old Road, on her way to the city of Zoot to paint the Warlord Drissa’s portrait. She was in a bit of a rush, but still found the time to stop and watch the sun rise brilliant and resplendent in the eastern sky. Not only that, she found the time to sit and paint the sky, trying to capture it in all of its beauty.

Rebekah really did have a skill that even the great Malronti—for all of his fame and acclaim—didn’t possess. She saw things as they really were, but she also saw them as they could be. She painted them in such a way that they could be what she imagined—an illusion, yes, because her painting wasn’t reality, but a believable illusion that could be true. 

She saw the beautiful sunrise and added just a touch more gold to the sun in her painting, a splash more red and orange to the warm way its light reflected off the clouds, and a more vibrant green to the trees that shared the canvas with the morning sun.

The scene she saw was by no means dull. It was beautiful without Rebekah adding to it at all. She could have painted it exactly as it was, and it would still be a beautiful sunrise. But with Rebekah’s artistic license, embellishing the scene ever so slightly, it became so much more. I have no doubt that it the sun had been able to see Rebekah’s portrait, it would have blushed.

As it so happened, while the sun did not see Rebekah’s portrait, someone else did—another traveler along the Old Road in the early morning on that Delin day. The traveler was an old woman with gray hair and lines on her weatherworn face. She wore a homespun traveler’s cloak and leaned on her walking stick as she stopped to admire Rebekah’s portrait.

“Funny,” she said, still staring at the portrait. “I’ve seen more sunrises and sunsets than I can count in my lifetime, and I’ve never given them much thought at all. But I’ll remember this one.”

With that, the old woman moved on before Rebekah could even really thank her for the compliment. The artist was struck by the old woman’s words. Suddenly, she knew the answer that she needed to keep going and doing what she did. Rebekah smiled briefly and then laughed. She packed up her paints, left the canvas and the portrait of the sunrise where it was on the side of the Old Road, and kept walking. (This was technically littering, Dear Reader, but this section of the Old Road between the city of Zoot and Noot wasn’t sponsored and was heavily littered with refuse from travelers. At least Rebekah’s painting served a better purpose than the empty bottles and food wrappers from taverns.)

Rebekah had just painted an inaccurate portrait of the sunrise, and it hadn’t hindered another person’s ability to enjoy it; in fact, it had improved upon the sunrise for that old woman. It had helped her see the beauty of the sunrise for the first time in decades. 

If Rebekah’s art could do that for a simple sunrise, could it not do the same for portraits of terrible, inhumane warlords? Could it perhaps be that her art could slowly, subtly influence the very subjects of the portraits? By staring at their idealized reflections, illusory though they were, perhaps the Forty-Seven Warlords would begin to see themselves differently. Perhaps by seeing the people they could become, that would lead them to change themselves from who they were presently, for the better. 

Perhaps… Just perhaps… Inaccurate portrayals weren’t a bad thing in art after all. 

From that day on, Rebekah continued to paint inaccurate portraits of the Forty-Seven Warlords. She painted them not as she saw them—horribly flawed, tragically inhumane, terrible beings. Instead, she painted them with subtle influences of who they could become, given enough time and barring one of their rivals taking them out.

Rebekah was painting inaccurate illusions, distorted reflections that did not reflect reality, but that no longer bothered her as much. She was trying to change the world, one portrait at a time. She couldn’t stop the warlords outright, but she could influence them with a magic inherent to art. 

At the end of the day, I believe that’s what every artist and creative being seeks to do, in their own way with their own craft.

At the very least, it’s what I’m trying to do with mine.