Frank Turner

This is part of a short story I wrote for a school competition on Turner. I decided to create Turner as a 21st century art student. I may update this with the ending later.

Frank Turner let his eyes flutter open on to the brilliant window. Great shafts of blueish-green sunlight were filling the room, iridescent with dust and covering every surface. The lapping of placid waves grew gradually louder in his ears. It wasn’t until a gentle feminine cough behind him that he realised the waves were pages turning.

“Wakey, wakey, Frank.” 

Frank yawned and turned round. Morgan was looking through his portfolio again. She ran her fingers over his oil studies, delicate sketches, scanning them with her viridian eyes.

“I’m just admiring your genius. I hope you don’t mind.”

Strands of her hair caught separate hues of the light; jade, electric blue, gold. He’d always wanted her to sit for him. She was the only portrait he needed. Perhaps it was because she alone captured that untenable, ever-changing brilliance of a landscape. Perhaps it was because he wanted to stare at her face for hours.

“I am in need of some serious inspiration. And I saw you were asleep, again.”

“You won’t get any inspiration from that,” Frank groaned. He felt the glow of the window draw his eyes back to it. The afternoon sky was cloudless and pearly silver beyond the specked glass. The sun hung suspended like a haunting spirit inches above the strip of sea trapped between the towers and spires of the town below. Everything was liberally coated in thick white light. 

“My work is indistinct.” Frank turned reluctantly back to Morgan. She held her face centimetres from an old water colour of his.

"My dear..." she murmured, "..my dear... your work is no less than extraordinary...."

A single flake of snow brushed the window pane. Inhaling what Frank felt was sea air, cold and brusque in his nostrils, he got up, coaxed his portfolio out of Morgan's grasp, and marched her out of the college into the world.