The Art of Making Art is Putting it Together! Art isn't Easy. (Closed: Ghostie)

[Elderflower]

Luminous Charge was frustrated. Beyond frustrated, but also considerably happy. Moving his artwork and installing it for an exhibition was always a bizarre combination of joy and unsurpassable stress. His perfectionist streak would have been bad enough if he were a painter and simply had to worry about how to hang a piece, but his work was…difficult. Frustrating. And very, very fragile.

The sculptor sighed and soothed the tension building in his forehead with a hoof as the prep worker employed by the gallery opened the final box containing his work, pushing back the wooden lid so the glass pieces were visible. Glass. Why did he have to be so irrevocably fixated on glass? He knew he was working with professionals: the prepatorial staff at the Oakwall Institute of Art were efficient and reliable workers. They had put together countless shows and handled every kind of art that Equestria has seen – his own included. But Lume’s sculptures were like children to him, and he doubted he would ever stop worrying himself sick when he had to move them.

Fortunately the unicorn assisting him had a talent for anchoring spells that magically rooted his fragile glass pieces into the earth. She also knew some fortifying spells that would make them resilient to the elements – very useful magic when you worked for an art institute with an outdoor sculpture park! The winged stallion was glad for her assistance.

“Alright,” he said quietly to the mare, surveying the work about him with a small frown of concentration, “We managed to get one third of this put up yesterday, and that third was made up of the heaviest pieces. We should be finished later this afternoon or at least early tomorrow.”

­Shy as usual, the lavender-hued mare simply nodded and blushed while he spoke. He wasn’t quite sure if she was naturally shy or afraid of him (which happened more than he liked, to be sure), but despite his best efforts to be friendly he simply couldn’t get her to speak unless she absolutely needed to. His frown tightening a little, Lume approached their work from the previous day with a critical eye. He had smaller pieces inside, gestural sculptures of the various critters found in the wildlife sanctuary this art show was intended to raise funds for. With the whimsical nature of his glass, the result had been quite fanciful…rabbits which looked as though they were made of wind, multi-coloured koi that materialized from blue water currents, foxes leaping from swirls of fire. They were delicate pieces, but much smaller than this monstrosity. And much easier to install.

Before him, however, was perhaps the most ambitious, beloved, and hated piece in his collection, a behemoth composed of many small, individual pieces of different-coloured glass. The stallion had visited the wildlife sanctuary and the park space a few times before constructing his pieces, researching and sketching as much as he could in order to plan his work. The park itself was fenced in by trees rather than walls, and had small, impressive gardens tucked into the nooks and crannies of the wooded perimeter. Lume had decided to place his work in one of those colourful garden spaces. It began with tall, spiralling brown pillars standing among the trees, and from there he had constructed a whimsical garden of twisting green shrubs with ceramic buds and flowers glued on. Each glass shrub that mimicked the living plants they stood among, however, had colourful branches thrown into the mix for a touch of unreality. His fantastical pieces were seeded into the real gardens, creating a space of wonder that merged reality and imagination. And of course, to finish the scene he placed more animals in the same style as his artworks indoors amongst the flora. There were life-sized and larger-than-life rabbits, ferrets, foxes, butterflies, birds, and even a sulking wolf lurking among the trees, barely visible so that unless you took your time and looked closely, you would not see him. When the sunlight struck the glass, each piece would shine and paint the world around them in ethereal light from the coloured glass.

Well that’s what it would all look like when it was set up. The trees and shrubs already in place shone prettily enough in the morning sun, but there were long hours ahead before the work really came together. Many pieces were large and dense, so lifting them, setting them into place, and putting spells on them took time and energy. Of course it didn’t help that every so often pieces had to be rearranged the more the full scene came together.

It was time to get to work. Lume removed his worsted wool blazer and placed it over an empty crate, then rolled up the sleeves of his white button-up.

“Let’s start with the hydrangea,” he said, eyes still fixed on the work already in place. It would be a long day, but he expected more artists to show up soon – the curator had already gone to meet one a few minutes before they had begun to open crates – and once the real atmosphere of prep work started he and the lavender mare (Shimmer Shoe, he had to remember that) would be energized by the usual pre-show excitement.