Chapter 660 - 303: Burning Canvas (Happy Mid-Autumn Festival)

The chaotic tones piled up into a chaotic mood.

The atmosphere in the sketch turned gloomy quickly, the sorrowful mood filled the entire room.

Expressing tragedy — an eternal and indestructible aesthetic theme in works of art.

The indescribable sense of sorrow between life and death is the most soul-shattering scene within this theme.

Anya frowned in pain.

A former Impressionist predecessor once told the woman artist.

When a painter pours their passion for art onto the canvas, the audience can easily feel your excitement.

The more passionately the painter paints, the more pleasant the audience’s viewing experience.

Only tragedy is an exception.

Creating tragedy is a masochistic form of self-torture.

The charm of tragedy is the act of shattering the most exquisite porcelain for others to behold.

It is a fragment of the Jun Kiln, broken at the "moment after the rain when the clouds part," each piece as thin as paper, each as clear as jade, instead making the audience holding it feel the cruelty of fate.

Profound sorrow is like a black fog, dangerous and strongly corrosive.

It destroys not only the good mood of those viewing sketches but also the creator themselves. Because the painter is always the first viewer of their work.

So that predecessor chose to be a pure Impressionist landscape painter after the age of forty.

He never created any work with a dark tone again, nor did he participate in any exhibition with tragic elements.

The predecessor said he had collected an interesting statistic, that Impressionism is currently the longest-living school of art in North America and the European Continent.

Not in terms of the longevity of its history, but in terms of biological longevity.

Monet lived to 86, Degas lived to 83, Renoir died at 85. To this day, there are quite a few centenarian Impressionists still alive.

Compared to the symbolist painters who loved to engage in themes of decadence, melancholy, loneliness, and wanderlust—always painting things like "Island of Death" or "Death of the Angel," and who often passed away in their thirties or forties—the Impressionists persevered more.

After all, the former depicted the aesthetics of sunlight, while the latter depicted the aesthetics of sorrow.

Doing this kind of work, if a painter stays cheerful and uplifted every day, it suggests they are not excellent enough, because they don’t move even themselves.

Truly excellent.

It’s easy to paint yourself to death while painting.

Of course, this is just a jocular quip.

But if the previous Detective Cat’s sketches of Amy the Cat were adorable, fun, and made Lady Anya’s estrogen surge with a desire to raise a child for fun, then...

The moment she met Amy’s lifeless gray-yellow eyes on this sketch.

She felt a suffocating, deep depressive air flowing from the artwork, pressing heavily upon her.

The woman artist had just experienced the joy of motherhood.

A few minutes later.

Anya began to empathize with a cat, taking on Amy’s perspective, feeling the sadness of a motherly cat saying farewell to the child she grew up with.

The woman artist turned her head, closed her eyes, unwilling to meet Amy’s gaze on the sketch again.

She imagined the scene and mood when Detective Cat painted this sketch.

It must have been drizzling outside the window, under an iron-gray sky reminiscent of an old black-and-white movie. A middle-aged woman, in shadow, her skin tone indistinguishable, silently smearing paint on the canvas with an oil painting knife. On the screen beside her, a cat was saying goodbye to her child.

The air was filled with a ghostly, inescapable sadness.

Almost tangible.

Had Lady Detective Cat experienced a similar event, to express a cat’s mood so deeply penetrating?

A sob echoed from the living room.

Tony initially suppressed his sobs, but soon, soft sobbing turned into a wail.

Tears streamed down, wetting his collar.

Detective Cat’s sketch took Tony back to that cruel night of parting twenty-one years ago.

Tony reached out, wanting to take the cat from the screen.

His palm created a ripple-like wave on the TV.

The screen seemed like a surface of a lake splitting the virtual from reality, coldly severing his fingers that longed to bridge time.

It told Tony,

That was a past he could never return to.

"Alas."

Jean Arnou knew this would be the result, pulling Tony back from the screen.

Detective Cat’s painting knife work could penetrate his son’s heart, but letting Tony relive such a sorrowful event was likely not a good thing.

He turned his head with an inquiring look at Dr. Jin.

Seeing Dr. Jin Anqing had no intention to stop, he softly asked, "Is there more?"

"Yes, a total of twenty-seven sketches were sent, this is just the nineteenth."

The assistant nodded.

"Then let’s continue."

"There are eight more?" Professor Boggs suddenly showed interest.

These nineteen pieces already encapsulated all of Amy and Tony’s past events.

The remaining eight should all be the works of Detective Cat’s imagination?

It seems Detective Cat hadn’t let things spiral irretrievably, and she had her unique creative ideas.

Even though no design could reach the sublime level of his own "Reincarnation" artistic theme.

But something is better than nothing.

This shows that the illustrator’s occupational "bad habit" of forgoing thought and drawing whatever the employer wants hadn’t deeply tainted her yet.

"Is it half real, half virtual too?"