Twenty years of trying, perhaps. More.
And much of it was bad.
That shocked her more than the quantity. Several strips were noticeably worse than his public work. Not interestingly experimental. Just failed. Chalked. Dead. Overcut with binder. One muddy green had collapsed into the exact color of old fish skin. A reddish wash on another board looked like someone had tried to paint blood from memory after a head injury.
Private practice, stripped of the dignity public competence usually granted it.
Mavrek sat on a low stool by the lamp with a shell palette in one hand and a brush in the other, adding a thin wash to yet another sample strip already crowded with attempts. He glanced up at her, followed her gaze around the room, and returned to the strip without visible embarrassment.
"You keep unstable jars on shelves for education," Iva said at last. "And whatever this is appears to be an argument with color conducted over several geological eras."
"Aye."
Not defensive. Merely accurate.
She stepped farther in despite herself, careful of the boards and the pinned sample cards underfoot. Closer, the evidence became even stranger. The samples were not arranged by hue progression or binder family or date. If there was a system, it lived entirely inside Mavrek's head and had no mercy for visitors. Some strips bore twenty attempts at nearly the same color. Others jumped violently from marsh-red to pale shell-ash to a green-black so dense it drank the lamplight.
"These are not elegant," she said before tact could stop her.
His mouth twitched once. "Nay."
"Several are awful."
"Aye."
That answer, too, without offense.
Iva looked at him properly then. He had not hidden this. Had not made any move to gather the boards or slide them out of sight. Which was its own kind of vulnerability, though not the curated kind artists liked to perform in stories about themselves. This was mess. Persistence. Failure left in plain view because the work had not yet solved itself and pretense would not help.
"What are you trying to find?" she asked.
Mavrek tipped his current sample toward the lamp, studying the wet shift as it dried. "A color."
"Thank you. I had mistaken this for devotional carpentry."
The almost-smile again, brief and low. "A specific color."
He did not say what it was. Just set the strip aside among the others with the flat finality of a man admitting one more failure to the pile and meaning to continue anyway.
Iva moved along the nearest wall, cataloguing before she could stop herself. The older samples had darkened at the edges where the binder oils had aged. Several boards near the bed platform were flecked with shell white in patterns suggesting they had been revisited over years rather than made once and abandoned. One strip pinned higher than the rest had been scraped back almost to raw wood and painted over so many times it had gained its own topography.
Not elegant. Embarrassing, really. The visible form of a private obsession no one had cleaned up for outside eyes. He had left the failures where a visitor could read them, as if privacy here meant choosing the witness, not hiding the work.
And because she was who she was, the recognition landed anyway.
Not in content. Not a neat mirror. She did not have twenty years of failed boards pinned over her sleeping place. Her own private practice was quieter and meaner: beauty moments stored in memory like contraband, each one too exact to share. His obsession had flooded outward into materials. Hers had gone inward and sharpened in the dark.
Different shape. Same species.
She almost said it aloud. Almost said,I collect beautiful things I've found in damaged walls, and I keep them in memory because I was afraid that writing them down would make them readable, and I have never told anyone about them, and yourroom looks like what my mind looks like if my mind were braver about being seen.
The confession rose to the back of her teeth and stopped there.
He caught her looking at one particularly overworked strip pinned near the lamp. An impossible gray-green that shifted muddy to luminous and back depending on angle, never quite settling.
"That one failed three times today," he said.
"Only three? You're losing discipline."